Watch Lungfish play a rare live show in 1998
Video captures the band playing a raw and intense set from their late-90’s catalog.
Lungfish more or less stopped playing live shows after touring in support of 1996’s Sound In Time. For the rest of the 90’s they’d play for themselves in their Baltimore rehearsal space 3–4 times a week and produce an album a year for Dischord but they’d rarely perform live — opting instead for a handful (or less) of shows in driving distance each year. If I’m not mistaken in 1999 they didn’t play any shows. They weren’t on hiatus or anything like that it just wasn’t something they were thinking about. All of that being a long way of saying that ANY Lungfish video from after 1996 is a gift.
But this show is really a gift.
It’s VHS so the sound isn’t great but its good enough that I’ve listened to 3 or 4 times and it shows why Lungfish were best seen live. The songs are loud and noisy and singer Dan Higgs seems swept up in them in a way that doesn’t come across on their records (except for maybe on the Tim Green-produced Feral Hymns). Higgs growls and screams through some of the quietest songs in their catalog like “You Did Not Exist” from Indivisible and the instrumental “Free State” (though he keeps all his howling away from the mic presumably out of respect for the song). As usual the band is utterly stoic while Higgs’ performance is both magnetic and off-putting. He opines about playing next to the ocean one minute and doing unsettling hand-gestures that are sort of in time to the music in the next moment.
An interesting thing to take note of as well is that at this point Lungfish have been around for a decade and have a cult following. It would have been a big deal to see this show but the band has no interest in fan service. After Sound In Time came out they never played any songs from the earlier albums but this is only 2 years later and they only perform one track from that record. Six of the songs come from Artificial Horizon which had only been released a month before while two more of these tracks wouldn’t appear on record for another year and on top of that, they end the set with what is basically unreleased hymn — “God’s Will”. Obviously there’s no encore. This was a band operating for no other reason than it’s own desire to create and play music.
Luckily for me this setlist is pulled from my favorite period of the band — 1996–2000 — and includes a number of my all-time favorite Lungfish songs: the aforementioned “You Did Not Exist” and “God’s Will”, “Vulgar Theories” from The Unanimous Hour, Sound In Time’s “Sphere of Influence” and “Ann The Word” off of Artificial Horizon.
Make sure you grab some headphones and don’t try to multi-task — you won’t be able to divert your attention from the screen.
Oh, and wait until you see how they handle equipment malfunctions.
Setlist:
Black Helicopters
Oppress Yourself
You Did Not Exist
Vulgar Theories
Love Will Ruin Your Mind
Free State
Sphere of Influence
Yellow Sun
Pray For The Living
Ann The Word
Armageddon (unreleased)
God’s Will
Episode 2 dissects the debut 7” from Lincoln — a band whose later releases would define emo for a decade but whose start was both heavy and melodic.