Ready To Fight

Photo by Michelle Ford

Hardcore is just about the gayest form of music around. Electroclash? At least those guys had the balls to come out with it and dress like women. Italo-disco? Those guys can all take ten times the drugs you could. Hardcore, on the other hand, is full of rippling, topless, sweaty, repressed guys groping each other to bands with names that sound like they were made up by an insecure four-year-old with a tough-guy complex. All of a sudden, though, a group of four mouthy girls from Vancouver have turned up to save the day and show all the dickless boy-wonders how it’s done. White Lung combine the feral energy of the Germs with the taut, wiry dynamics of the Wipers and have released a string of singles that keep improving in a bewilderingly exponential fashion. In fact, they are this repressed hardcore kid’s favourite new punk band as of right now. Vice: What is a “white lung”? It sounds like a black lung gone nuclear. Natasha Reich (guitar): An eight-legged ball of fury. Grady Mackintosh (bass): Isn’t it a degenerative disease associated with long-term asbestos exposure? Mish Way (vocals): No! A “white lung” is the slang term for a disease that bakers get from inhaling flour. Our friend Steven worked at a bakery and suggested we call the band White Lung. We had a show coming up and we were still nameless but they needed to make posters and White Lung worked. It sounded pure but intrinsically disgusting. I liked it immediately. You list “fighting with taxi drivers” as an influence. How often do you find yourselves trading blows with cabbies? Natasha: It’s pretty hard to find a cab driver that will pick up four people equipped with amps and guitars. Usually we end up having to get one person to stand up the road a bit and flag one down then while they’re distracting the driver we all run up with the equipment and throw it in. Mish: I wish you’d asked how “hot teenagers” influenced our music instead. You guys might just be the first punk band ever to have a song about ketamine. Over here it’s mainly a drug that squat kids who listen to psy-trance take. Mish: That’s hilarious that you associate ketamine with psy-trance kids. One of my ex-boyfriends befriended another ex-boyfriend of mine when they both lived in Berlin. It broke my jealous little heart. They partied a lot together and one used to feed the other ketamine. The song is just an excuse for me to be a resentful hag through shitty symbolism. Do you ever get shit being a band of laydees in the sweaty, macho, male world of punk? Natasha: Once a guy walked up to me while we were playing and broke my guitar in half, chucked it at some innocent girl, and told us to get punk or get out. So I killed him with my bare hands. CIRCLE JAMS
White Lung’s “Magazine” seven-inch is available now on Deranged Records. myspace.com/whitelungwhitelung