In 2010-2011, the Manchester, England rock band WU LYF (World Unite! Lucifer Youth Foundation) dropped itself into the world of indie rock with a heavy touch of mystery, lots of acclaim and hype for the band's one and only album, 2011's Go Tell Fire To The Mountain. Stereogum called it Manchester's "cultist non-cult band." Pitchfork gave WU LYF's debut album an 8.4. Zane Lowe raved about the song "Dirt." In Nov. 2012, the band was gone almost as quickly as they stormed the internet, when lead singer Ellery Roberts announced "WU LYF is dead to me."
Former WU LYF member "Lung" — a.k.a. Tom McLung — returns with a new song as Francis Lung, "I Wanna Live In My Dreams," premiered by World Cafe.
Where WU LYF skirted a continuum of post-rock and art-rock, dancing on the edges of some weird mashup that sounded like The Birthday Party and Future Islands, this new song from Lung has quite the opposite sound. It's a song that bridges breezy baroque pop with gorgeous Beach Boy-esque harmonies, and crafty, catchy songwriting chops that would sound right at home on an album by the '90s power pop cult band Jellyfish. It draws on '50s era Brill Building songwriting smarts, pays tribute to Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, and indulges us in the joy of Big Star's pop songs.
As sweet and dynamic as the song is, the video is even better. Directed, animated and edited by Lung, the video for "I Wanna Live In My Dreams" is a wonderfully detailed and delightful kaleidoscopic trip. At it's lyrical heart, it's a tender love song with the central character one that Lung created, "Ghostface."
I've never made anything like this before but for some foolish reason I thought it would be a good idea to spend four months of my life learning how to animate.
As Lung explains in the press release for the video, "Ghostface is a character I've been drawing for years, but I've never been quite sure why. I thought it would be nice to give him some purpose by creating this story about him. I've never made anything like this before but for some foolish reason I thought it would be a good idea to spend four months of my life learning how to animate. It's a combination of stop motion, keyframe and hand-drawn animation and it's made up of thousands upon thousands of frames. I nearly pulled out all my hair making it."
As he continues, Lung says the song is an homage to The Ronettes, "written when I was in love with sleeping and found it very hard to do much else. There are obvious allusions to suicide here and eternal sleep, but to me it's more about an alternate reality than being death-obsessed."
Lung is currently working on his debut album, which will be released via Memphis Industries.
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