We Are Always Searching

Album Review

Just in time for Halloween comes the first full-length from I Am Ghost, Southern California's spookiest punk band. The eerie, ethereal, windswept "The Dead Girl Epilogue: Part One" sets the stage for the album's lyrical desolation, a eulogy for lives broken by unrequited romances and emotions wreaking havoc on sanity. This is teenage angst gone mad, where every slight is cause for despair, love lost a cause for suicide, and even love found a call to die, lest love should fade away. But in a Prozac nation, where both thought and emotion are so thoroughly stifled, refusing to simply get it over it and move on is perhaps the most revolutionary stance one can currently take. In which case, Ghost nail their spectral flag to love as obsession, hate as release into the purity of madness and murder, while railing against impermanence by refusing to let things change. Musically Ghost are just as extreme, interweaving the lush moodiness of goth with the rabid fury of hardcore punk, tossing in lashings of metal and hard rock for good measure with sprinkles of the droney desperation of the Banshees. What sets them apart, however, is their rich harmonies, which borrow from both modern melodic punk and classic '70s rock. And no, they're nothing like Marilyn Manson, in case you were wondering, much more musically in tune with the likes of Green Day than the gloomy Bowie of Manson's dreams. Can Ghost make goth rise again? If the rabid response in the So-Cal scene is indicative, indeed they can.