If some album artwork is just a handy wrapper, something merely to look nice and often bearing little relevance to the music it houses, that is certainly not the case here. The cover was produced by vocalist and co-lyricist Lisa Wood, and it is from this that the album takes its name: a striking, beguiling image which represents the idea that new, more positive blossoms thrive from the failures and pain of the past. If so much can be inferred from the cover, imagine how much more there is to explore in the album’s layered, emotive lyrics.
Many years in the making, Failure Blooms explores these truths, especially how loneliness, isolation, and longing can become a catalyst for resilience, transformation, and growth.
‘There Against the Wall’ creeps in on a dark and brooding bass pulse, one slowly cocooned in shimmering and mercurial guitar textures and driven on by the chill of digital drums. It’s a graceful and gossamer soundscape and the perfect introduction to the album.
With founder member and multi-instrumentalist David Strong captaining the sonic ship, Ghost Painted Sky sails through some fantastically creative waters, and tides take them through darkwave delicacy and gothic grit, cinematic soundscaping and alt-rock energies, with additional guitar work from Michael Boudreau lacing through to help create a new take on post-punk for the post-genre age.
Aurora Grabill threads violin through ‘Corridors’ and ‘Kissing Lions’, though rather than the usual separation such an instrument is subjected to, here it is affected and woven through, adding gorgeous textural weight. The current single, ‘Sound and Fury’, is gothic, gritty and groovesome, exploring ideas of public identity and the masks that we wear for the benefit of others.
Perhaps saving the best till last, ‘The Fire, The Flame’ takes the dark weaves and gothic shade that run through the album and creates cinematic walls of sound, an anthemic ending to an artful album.
And it should be noted that in an album built on cinematics and soundscaping, Lisa Wood’s vocals are an integral part, sitting somewhere between the haunted and the vulnerable, a lyrical voice and a musical texture in its own right.
Despite Failure Blooms comprising a sound sketched through many deft lines and ephemeral musical layers, when all are brought together, their combined weight is more than the sum of its parts, the result as often gossamer and opaque as it is melodic and muscular, sometimes finding a route through all of those opposites at the same time.
Bandcamp
Website
YouTube
Instagram
