Review: Ghost (Simon Black)

Ghost – Skeletá (Loma Vista Recordings)

So, Ghost then.

Whether you love ‘em or loathe ‘em, this band certainly have the Marmite factor (see my article here from a few years back explaining this) Here. My first exposure wasn’t until 2017, but its safe to say that the theatrics, the silliness of revolving door of Papa’s, the whacky backstory of the Order and the frankly banging tunage got me good and hard that day at Bloodstock. Not long after that they started playing the arenas as a headliner in their own right, and if last week’s frankly spectacular show at Birmingham’s Utilita Arena is anything to go by, next time it’s going to be the stadia.

The release model seems to have settled into its own distinct unit of measure, which I am going to call the ‘Papa’, where one Papa equals two studio albums, a covers EP and a live album (+ optional cinematic movie release). Transitions from one front man to the next (yeah, I know) have until recently been restricted to the end of a touring cycle, so if you weren’t there you had to rely on shaky phone cam footage on YouTube to find out the fate befalling the previous iteration, whose reward for increasing the impact of the band is to suffer a humiliating and terminal removal from the stage, but Papa IV got the most formal send off to date captured in the Rite Here Rite Now movie, but we had no idea what was coming after.

Something similar happens with the studio albums, which whilst tethered to a core sound take the music in subtly different directions each and every time. Prequelle, with its Prog Medieval conceptual feel remains a high point personally, and whilst I get the roaring 20’s Modernist feel that Tobias Forge was aiming for with Impera, it did not grab me as an album in the way its predecessor did (even if it did score hugely with the public at large). This left me slightly worried about what was coming, given that Ghost are now so huge they don’t need to hit the back of the net every time (and let’s face it the new album cover isn’t a good start).

It shouldn’t matter, because all of that should be an extra layer of fun and not distract from the core. For me this begins first and foremost with the music however, so does Skeletá cut the mustard? I got to hear a couple of the new songs live, but with the shitty acoustics at the back of the arena it wasn’t easy to get to the nitty gritty, but Skeletá as an album wastes no time getting down to business.

The songs old and new work well in the large live environment, but opener Peacefield is pure AOR stadium rock by design. The album carries on galloping forwards with back of the net belters, and even when it takes slightly lighter directions such as Cenotaph, it does so with thundering and relentlessly heavy rhythmic delivery counterpointing the lighter melody lines. It’s probably the weakest track on here, but its still head and shoulders over most of its predecessor.

Forge’s confidence as a songwriter has always been in place, but this album is bold and big, with a huge fat sound that the haters are going to hate, because it delivers the wry satanic messages more effectively and darkly than any amount of incomprehensible growls and gurgles across the more extreme edge of the Metal spectrum. Umbra is a fantastic example of this, probably the darkest lyrics of the whole piece, yet it sounds like an upbeat 80’s USA Rock Radio friendly anthem, complete with annoying cowbell. Hiding in plain sight at its best…

At least half of the tracks here are clearly going to staple live anthems for some time to come, and after the slightly off track feel of its predecessor, this album is a resounding banger through and through. So yes, this album is definitely the consistently strongest for some time, and although I’m yet to discover is its going to rack up as many end to end plays as either Prequelle or Meliora did, judging from what I have heard today (three times today and counting) it definitely will

Fundamentally with this release as with everything else they have done, Ghost remains the (one man) band that look like they ought to be nipping over the border from Sweden to torch a bunch of Norwegian churches, whilst sounding like ABBA meets stadium AOR Rock from the early 80’s. This time though, they probably aren’t far off of proving that in the right size venues globally or a field at a certain racetrack very soon… 10/10 (what else?)