A wind of English moorland, standing stones and pagan rituals blows through This Heathen Land. Green Lung, a London quintet that in a few years became one of the great affairs of the heavy-rock revival, cultivate here a folkloric, occult imagination served by a writing of fearsome efficiency. The critics agree: an 85 average across seven reviews, and a favourite’s status confirmed.
The recipe, on the face of it, is nothing new: fat riffs inherited from Black Sabbath, an omnipresent Hammond organ evoking the great hours of 1970s hard rock, choruses built to be sung en masse. But Green Lung add a melodic sense and a compositional science that set them clearly apart from the mass of retro bands.
What seduces is the balance between heaviness and light. The record is dark in its subject — witchcraft, untamed nature, the buried memory of deep England — but luminous in its execution, carried by almost solar soars. One thinks of a Blue Öyster Cult that had grown up in the British mists.
The press hail a broad, warm production that showcases each layer of the arrangement. Green Lung reinvent nothing, but they execute their programme with a class and a jubilation that carry conviction.
Verdict: 8.5. A generous, melodic record proudly anchored in its soil: proof that heavy rock, well played, has lost none of its power to enchant.
