Album Review: Lo-Pan, Get Well Soon
Posted in Reviews on March 31st, 2025 by JJ Koczan
There’s a lot going on here as regards narrative, so bear with me. Get Well Soon is the sixth full-length release from Columbus, Ohio, heavy rock four-piece, as well as their label-debut through Magnetic Eye Records, to which the band signed this past December. It’s been six years since the band put out Subtle (review here) through Aqualamb, which is the longest break they’ve had between albums (caveat of the plague applies). This year also makes it 20 years since the band first got together, picking up from the turn-of-the-century era of capital-‘h’ Heavy and rolling forward with a new generation’s verve. Lyrically, the record touches on themes from religion, war, the politics of both, touring life and more, and with nine memorable cuts playing out across 45 minutes, the four-piece of vocalist Jeff Martin, bassist Scott Thompson, guitarist Chris Thompson (not related so far as I know) and drummer Jesse Bartz, whose cancer diagnosis in 2022 looms among the contexts in which the record arrives.
But Get Well Soon, despite the evocation of the title and the way it points out the emptiness of such a phrase, calling to mind the platitudes, thoughts and prayers sent out on social media, ultimately empty, isn’t about Bartz‘s struggle. Martin offered the following: “If there is a lyrical theme to the album at all I’d say the message is that the war for your heart and soul is over… and you lost. This record isn’t about what comes next. It’s about sitting in that loss and coming to terms with it.”
Fair enough. The band recorded in Columbus with Joe Viers at Sonic Lounge and Andrew Schneider mixed at ACRE Audio in New York — both familiar collaborators — while Carl Saff mastered, and as one would expect for Lo-Pan 20 years on, they leave no question as to what they’re about. From the opening duo of “The Good Fight” and “Northern Eyes” through “God’s Favorite Victim,” which is pointedly about the ongoing Palestinian genocide, and closer “Six Bells,” which approaches the eight-minute mark and is a quintessential Lo-Pan slowdown set to maritime lyric calling back to “The Good Fight” and its line, “I keep on sailing the endless sea,” as well as “Stay With the Boat” and other flashes of what may or may not be tour-as-voyage metaphor throughout, since they have so much going on besides, it’s fortunate for the listener that the songs are so directed, so linear and so well executed.
Thus, in confusing, troubling, stupid times, Get Well Soon becomes both a reality check and an empathetic presence. More than ever before, Martin is in layered harmony with himself, and in addition to making “Northern Eyes” a highlight, the shifting character of Martin‘s voice in “Wormwood” — a little distorted as he shouts out foul beasts of Babylon in the early verse — and the subsequent echo-out in “Ozymandias” bringing the song to a conclusion after a quintessentially Lo-Pan verse that builds tension in the chug and opens to the chorus. The last lines there, “Words that hang on the breeze/Calling out through the trees/Now they’re rotting away/Falling more everyday,” are broad enough to read just about anything into them, where in centerpiece “Rogue Wave” the punch of Thompson‘s bass and the ripper of a guitar solo that follows complement further references to the sea and a kind of hopelessness about making amends.
I don’t actually know this, but “Rogue Wave” is likely also where the vinyl split is — that puts five tracks on side A and four on side B, but with “Six Bells” as the longest, it makes sense — and so as Thompson‘s guitar starts off “Harper’s Ferry” and Bartz eases in with cymbal wash before they smoothly move into the verse of “Harpers Ferry” as Martin invokes fire-and-brimstone preaching to recount the 1859 anti-slavery revolt led by John Brown, a pre-Civil War action the relevance of which goes beyond the US’ original sin of slavery to apply to the current day. Maybe a little inspirational/aspirational? Maybe a self-directed pep talk? Could be.
But again, Get Well Soon isn’t a feelgood record. Make no mistake, Lo-Pan kill it across the board — “Harpers Ferry” could’ve opened the record — the energy is rife and the grooves are mighty, but it’s also heavy vibes in heavy times. “Stay With the Boat” distinguishes itself in both melody and rhythm and exciting turns met with something of a lyrical defeat — remember what Martin said; it’s not that place where you’re picking yourself up, fighting, moving on, etc.; the point of view of Get Well Soon is still very much “in the shit” as regards the stages of grief, and it feels emotionally braver for that — and feels like it came together smoothly, however it actually might have. Everything fits, and if you want a five-minute cut to emphasize Lo-Pan‘s strengths in songcraft or performance, it’s an easy pick.
One imagines “God’s Favorite Victim” is in the penultimate position on the record to be somewhat buried in the hope that the band don’t get disappeared in the night for criticizing Israel. In a country whose whole thing used to be free speech, assembly and whathaveyou, that’s a disappointing and more-than-a-little-horrifying reality to face (to say the least of it), but the band do not mince words in calling out villainy, repression and state-sponsored murder. They do so in a classic Lo-Pan crunch and pull, the verse tightening and the chorus letting loose. It’s nothing new for the band, mind you. Hence “classic.” They’ve done it on Get Well Soon a couple times already, and their 20-year history is replete with chorus aligning, turning, sometimes exploding out of dug-in verses. It is a part of their DNA as a group.
So too are pieces like “Six Bells.” As a fan, my mind immediately flashes to “Bird of Prey” from their 2011 Small Stone-delivered breakout, Salvador (review here) for an example, and that song would seem to get a namedrop in the second verse: “They’ll never understand the bird of prey.” If I’ve focused a lot on the lyrics in this review, and I think I have, it’s a result of the obvious thought and consideration that went into framing and telling the stories the band are telling. “Six Bells” manages to both reference William Blake and include plain-language lines like “You’ve never been my friend,” and “We’ve never been a team,” which feel honest and sincere and cutting. “Ozymandias” holds a warning from Percy Bysshe Shelley, and seems to capture a particular Summer-of-’24 electoral energy with, “Every day getting closer to the dying of the light/And if the fire doesn’t kill her then a new perspective might.” It’ll be something when the democrats run Harris again in the primary for 2028, assuming they haven’t all been gulagged by then.
But it’s the emotive cast of “Six Bells” as delivered through Martin‘s unmatched-in-the-heavy-underground soul, and the force of the full band, whether it’s Bartz‘s cyclical tom runs, Scott‘s crucial low end groove running around Chris‘ riffing and well-plotted leads or what — Get Well Soon emphasizes everything that has not only let Lo-Pan flourish for two decades, most of which they’ve spent as one of the US’ finest acts in underground heavy. And as the finale’s hook anchored is with, “Held down, surrounded by what’s drowning me/Six bells I’m never, ever sick at sea,” the band offer resolution without giving up the still-in-it crux of feeling and being defeated.
In no small part thanks to movement of the songs themselves, Get Well Soon doesn’t sound that way, i.e. defeated. What it seems to do instead is offer the band’s point of view not necessarily as a salve — there’s zero sugar-coating in the lyrics, zero pretense in the construction of the songs; Lo-Pan are not pretending this is something other than the album of songs that it is — but as an experience to which one might relate and feel a little less alone. It’s not for nazis even passively and that it’s willing to take a stand is one more thing to like about it as Lo-Pan remain grounded in a moment that seems to be calling for so much panic. Turns out there is strength to be found in being so thoroughly, existentially beaten.
Consider yourself lucky to be spared some flowery conclusion about Lo-Pan‘s 20 years and the work they’ve done in that time. The truth is they’ve had an influence, but Lo-Pan have never really had much interest in trying to carry the genre or the “scene” on their shoulders. They are who they are, and Get Well Soon doesn’t reinvent their approach, but it showcases the steady growth and identity that has emerged in their work over the amassed decades, countless tours and now-six full-lengths, each of which is a progressive step forward from the last. That’s a thing to celebrate in itself, busy as Lo-Pan might be otherwise.
