With Love Ghost, collaboration has always been the name of the game, a way of injecting fresh ideas and pushing boundaries within their own, ever-broadening sonic landscape. But up until now, those collaborations have been short stops, one-offs, enough to keep things moving forward and exciting before heading off into the unknown. So, with a full album brought to life between these alternative mavericks and the genius mind of industrial music icon Tim SKOLD, there is obviously a more meaningful meeting of minds than usual at work.
And that is something that is borne out by the music. Here, Love Ghost’s alt-rock and grungey roots are brilliantly blended with SKOLD’s more industrial and nu-metal mind.
But, the whole point of collaboration is pushing each other far beyond your creative comfort zones to create something more than the sum of its parts. And so it is that process that we find coloring the music here.
“Great White Buffalo” has a sort of metal-ska groove at its heart, the warm sound of that genre’s guitar lick replaced by a six-string, abrasive industrial attrition. There are, for want of a better term, future-rock ballads with “Spacedust “ and post-breakup, post-indie meets post-rock salvos thanks to “Payback.”
Let’s not forget the two singles that have also dropped to critical and commercial acclaim – the slow-burning and brooding “Nightshade and Cocaine” and the raw futuristic metal of “Ski Mask.”
Love Ghost has come a long way since I first encountered them all those years ago, further certainly, in terms of creativity and experimentation, than you might expect the average alt-rock band to have travelled. But the great thing about them is that just when you think they have no more sonic worlds to conquer, they always find a new sonic space to explore.
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Ski Mask – Apple Music
