EP Review: One Day You’ll Be The Best Thing That’s Ever Happened To Someone

Lucifer Gunne come out with an EP of acoustic sessions showcasing the dark and pensive songwriting of lead man Rory McDonald. McDonald‘s unusual voice is an amalgam of influences including Marilyn Manson, Kurt Cobain and Mike Patton. One Day You‘ll Be The Best Thing That’s Ever Happened To Someone is a chance to examine the pathos and core musicality of the alt rock outfit. The stripped back approach lets the goth and post punk influences take a more prominent place in the band‘s genre mix.

The EP hints at a band just starting to get a feel for the lengths they will be able to push themselves and their sound as they create more material. The song names are pieces of art in and of themselves; descriptive, original and detailed while remaining mysterious enough to create a frenzy in the mind of anyone trying to discern their trajectory. Heart Rate Monitor and The Brain Named Itself are the kind of attention piquing combinations of words in the arsenal. The incomparable A Pig on Antibiotics must be one of the best song names ever coined. Definitely the best pig related name and in the top ten of Antibiotic songs.

A Pig on Antibiotics has a consistent and even–handed progression with a smashing crescendo. The great open chords let the strings ring out nice and creepy. As my personal favourite song on the EP, I gravitated to what I heard as “The Symmetry never frightened me till I realized what it‘s doing to me.” The real lyric may refer to a cemetery but I‘m sold on my interpretation. Angel‘s Mark utilizes the beautiful treble sound of open acoustic strings against lofty octaves, and this approach of reinforcing fretted notes with open ones in tasty minor intervals continues to be used to great effect on later tracks like Coexistence and Orchids.

The band brings the melodic mood up a bit in the midway point of the track list with a cover of Neutral Milk Hotel‘s In the Airplane Over the Sea. They manage to translate the song into the world of One Day You‘ll Be The Best Thing That’s Ever Happened To Someone and relate a sense of levity in romanticism amidst the crushing weight of existential dread, punctuated by that final line, “how strange it is to be anything at all.”

By the look of the way their output and activity have increased in the last year, Lucifer Gunne seem ready to burst into a solid stride across the musical universe. One Day You‘ll Be The Best Thing That’s Ever Happened To Someone feels like the perfect deep cut to go back and visit for the keen fans that they collect over the near future. Listen to the EP, watch out for the band.