GHOST BATH — Funeral (review)

Album · 2014 · Depressive Black Metal

2.5/5 · 2020-11-12
siLLy puPPy

GHOST BATH is probably best known in the world of black metal as claiming that they originated from Chongqing, China which was totally believable since the band went under the name 鬼浴 as well as its English name when it released this debut album FUNERAL on the Chinese record label Pest Productions. It wasn’t until this album caught the attention of various music media outlets like Pitchfork and Stereogum that the band came clean and admitted they were not Chinese at all but was actually from the US plains city of Minot, North Dakota. The band even used Chinese characters for their names which featured the lineup of 丹尼斯 [Dennis Mikula] (vocals, guitar, piano), 多诺万 [Donovan] (vocals, guitar), 杰米 [Jaime] (bass) and 泰勒 [Taylor] (drums).

Gimmicks aside, GHOST BATH was formed in 2012 and is the project of band leader Dennis Mikula who has crafted a brand of post-rock inspired depressive black metal that incorporates the blackgaze sounds of bands like Deafheaven and Alcest with heavy doses of caustic tremolo picking in typical black metal fashion including blastbeats and a bleak atmospheric cloud cover of synthesized doom and gloom. FUNERAL is a rather melodic beast with piano rolls offering melodic constructs for the black metal to rampage around. The tracks themselves rely on a cyclical sprawl derived from post-rock and blackgaze which means many of the album’s 12 tracks are lengthy incessant processions of black metal bombast mixed with atmospheric downer music. Some are surprisingly quite short though.

So far the band has released three albums and one EP with FUNERAL being the first full-length from 2014. Blackgaze is not my favorite style of black metal. Ideas are sparse, playing times are long and overbloated while the monotony sets in big time about half way through and in that regard GHOST BATH fits quite well into those parameters. While the music is decent and not horrible, the production value of the keyboard parts integrated with the black metal sounds a bit cheesy here but what really makes this a tedious listen is the incessant insane asylum screams that i don’t believe are actual lyrics. They are simply the same repetitive tortured clown screams over and over and over again.

Considering this album clocks in at about 64 minutes, it doesn’t take long for it to wear out its welcome. Even better bands like Deafheaven sound boring after long repetitive journeys through blackgaze pastures and atmospheric skies so there is absolutely nothing that GHOST BATH adds to the mix to give it any sort of identity. If it weren’t bad enough the band misrepresented its origins, so too does it simply apply sounds already crafted by other artists without leaving some sort of personalized stamp on it. Considering the horrible reviews of all the GHOST BATH albums i thought i’d check them out as i often find low rated albums to be some of the most interesting especially when they embark on an extremely experimental journey however in the case of GHOST BATH all the negative criticism seems to be true. This is just a rather run of the mill blackgaze / depressive black metal band with horrible lyrics and a knack for showing us how you can do very little in the span of an hour. Meh.