Ghost of You
Glacier and the City
Indies Scope, 2015

Simultaneously sweeping and minimalist at once, Ghost of You has been touring and playing festivals for the last few years, honing their musical chops and only stopping to release an EP in 2012.  While it is trivial and trite to say this album sounds like nothing else out there, especially since even the most original music must build on the innovators that have come before and evolved to help us all reach this moment in musical time, Ghost of You is not playing and recording music by the numbers as I am wont to refer to bands that rise and fall by the strength of cover songs that sound exactly like their originals.  No, these are wholly original, and while influenced, are not derivative.

And not surprisingly, as many non-English-speaking bands are not inspired to write and sing in their first language (as a few Italian friends of mine explained to me years ago), Glacier and the City is an English-Language album, and a poetically powerful one in combination with the grounding but sweeping melodies.  From the Top of Their Lungs embroils the listener into a vision of the city from on high, jumping off from a skyscraper, higher than high, and begin to fly and glide, screaming with joy.  While this describes my childhood desire to escape my surroundings, this track manifests a delicious vision that I am reluctant to deny.

As If You Died at My Birth is almost a lament for what could have been between mother and child, and lesson to fight for life at any cost, always moving forward, driving harder and harder for a goal that never ends.  The wall of sound envelops the listener into a neverending story of their own creation, a dystopian apocalyptic future where they have to fight for their future and the future of their collective, whether it be of the Mad Max Variety or otherwise.  It seems that my musically visionary theatrics are quite vivid today or maybe the music is at fault.

If I was of a trivial or record review magazine bent, I’d recommend Ghost of You if you like Radiohead or even Muse, but in the end you have to decide what new music you would like based upon your own unique tastes, influences, and tribulations.  Needless to say, this one will find it’s way into a future radio show, I suspect or even background music when I finally crack open long overdue works of Atwood or LeGuin.

RadioMike
7 March 2016

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