The Likes of Us: Hannah Versus Lanterns On The Lake
On earnestness, neurodivergence, the multiverse, and Lanterns on the Lake
My favorite film and record last year, Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans and Gang of Youths’ Angel in Realtime, were colossal, painfully earnest statements on grief and family that largely had mainstream American audiences shrugging their shoulders. But I admire anyone tackling those emotions through art — even if outsiders view it as indulgent, it’s at least not cynical or pandering.
Enter Lanterns on the Lake, a shoegaze band from Tyneside. I knew Lanterns on the Lake at all because their guitarist Paul Gregory mixed the lone album from Mastersystem, Scott Hutchison from Frightened Rabbit’s final project. His mixing work takes inspiration from 90s alternative rock, specifically the wide sound of Siamese Dream-era Smashing Pumpkins with some roomy In Utero snares and Sonic Youth cacophony mixed in: listen to Mastersystem’s “Bird is Bored Of Flying” and Minor Victories’ superlative noise-pop ballad “Scattered Ashes (Song For Richard)”. Lanterns, over a decade on the label Bella Union, became something of a cult UK band, culminating in a Mercury Prize nomination for 2020's Spook The Herd. Their most streamed song, “Through the Cellar Door,” is characteristic of their sound up to this point; Hazel Wilde cryptically whispers over a very National drum beat that periodically explodes into the kind of tones no Dessner brother would ever touch. Later releases would further double down on the post-rock until Spook The Herd brought them back to Earth.
Their new record, Versions of Us, drastically shifts from all that for a remarkably clean, alt-radio ready sound, mixed in Gregory’s bedroom. The album was made multiple times, first with the band’s old drummer Ol Ketteringham, second with Phillip Selway of Radiohead. It has the immediacy of a quick recording with the meticulous arrangement of someone that’s spent a long time with this set of songs. The band stretches in different directions here, jazz on “Vatican”, power pop on “Real Life”, and even trip-hop on “Rich Girls.” Wilde now belts on top of the mix instead of sinking in to the background, with hopeful lyrics inspired by her newfound motherhood. Her new musical persona is more flamboyant, charismatic enough to pull off lines like the borderline-campy “I’m gonna ride like a knight in the saddle of life/no more watching from the cheap seats.”
Not that Version of Us cares about how it’s perceived. There is none of the cautious self-consciousness that gave Fabelmans and Angel in Realtime their edge; there’s no Sammy-imagining-himself-filming-his-own-parent’s-divorce equivalent or candid admission that your motto on tour is “fuck you and pay me.” Yet, it’s that same purity of feeling that draws me in on Versions. Many of the lyrics are even about feeling deeply: “all those cynics and nihilists/Couldn’t stop me from feeling this”, “I’m feeling too much and I swear that I’m cursed/writing these songs is just making it worse” — there’s an intensity in Wilde’s delivery that makes even the lines that don’t land feel visceral. Resistance is futile; you are going to feel with her.
Hazel Wilde’s insistence on constantly gliding her notes might get to some over roughly 40 minutes, but I find that endearing, the sound of someone unapologetically going for it. Angela Chan‘s strings gracefully accentuate the newfound swagger, particularly on “The Likes of Us”, where she slides in as Wilde sings “I won’t let this spark die in me.” What ultimately wins me over is the work of Paul Gregory himself. Wide bursts of fuzz lend genuine weight to Wilde’s musings about love, this “strange old rock we’re spinning on”, and on one pivotal track, the ubiquitous multiverse.
Everything (everywhere, etc.) is about the multiverse right now; it’s the thought there must be more than this thing we’re stuck in, there must have been another way to avoid this impending civilization collapse. Lately, the concept is an excuse to jam in as many IP and as much fanservice as possible, in a way only magical to a studio executive. If Across the Spider-Verse couldn’t shake my fatigue, nothing will — even that one addresses the difficulty of actual imagination within the constraints of expected ‘beats’, or ‘canon events’ as the film puts it. “String Theory” didn’t hit me until recently, until it suddenly did; a big-hearted, wide-eyed song that I can’t listen to without tearing up a bit. The vocal samples and insistent bassline convey a feeling of actually traveling through space in a way that a million movies in The Volume cannot. “Theory” feels like discovering the concept of multiverse for the first time; there’s a deliberate, defiant naïveté to it that breaks down any defenses I could possibly have.
I can’t help but love Versions of Us unconditionally. It reminds me of a lot of things and a lot of people, but it reminds me of myself. I joked recently that autism, OCD, and ADHD (I’m diagnosed with all three) should be consolidated into Everybody Thinks You’re Weird Disorder, and it’s partly because full expression of feelings is often too much for neurotypicals. Okay, it’s also because of the obsessiveness and difficulty with boundaries people with those things largely face, but that’s for some other Medium post. I just feel safest in environments where self-expression, no matter how intense, is encouraged. And if they wear their sensitivity as a badge of honor? That’s even better.
I’m reminded of another friend, someone very openly, proudly neurodivergent. I was scared to be that. Around the time I saw the first Spider-Verse, and got swept up in the film’s sincere embrace of the superheroes he adored, I understood that it wasn’t a bad thing to be the thing I can’t help but being. Embracing this kind of overly earnest, heartfelt music is embracing a part of myself I’m supposed to not like, but a part I can’t erase, so I might as well accept it. In a world designed to kill your spark at every turn, there’s value in proclaiming, without any detatchment or distance: “I won’t let this spark die in me.”
