Poltergeists is a biweekly feature in which Michael and Wes share tracks that they have had on repeat over the past two weeks.
Michael
Fraunhofer Diffraction - “Final Feast”
Damn! I had been putting off listening to this album all week because I was super busy and wanted to sit down to spend some time with it to really get into the brainspace and I am so glad I did! The first track on the album Threads of Fate has a nice feel to it. It was familiar and I liked the ambience, but “Final Feast” really sold me on the entire album. This song caught me right away as it builds very quickly from a soft saw with some war samples under it to a big reveal: a catchy saw, some screaming, and a great dance beat. I wasn’t expecting the vocal element to this song but I think that it really makes the track flow emotionally from the verse into the chorus.
Ghost Bath- “The Silver Flower pt. 2”
Black Metal Watch 2015!
Ghost Bath is a band that I found by blissfully searching through and listening to everything that came up under the “Atmospheric Black Metal” Bandcamp tag. To be really honest, it was the cover that sold me first: a creepy black and white picture of a woman with a giant crescent moon for a face with no writing at all (credited as: "La Luna, 1989" by Luiz Gonzalez Palma). It is the perfect picture for Ghost Bath’s second full-length album, Moonlover. “The Silver Flower pt. 2” begins slowly with a really nice, ambient chord progression on a fairly clean guitar. Nature sounds are cut into the background and a bell tolls every few beats. The song kicks in for the first time with a powerful breakdown and that characteristically black metal high-pitched scream that sends waves of Burzumic nostalgia down my spine. This song is really great and if you like it, go back and listen to the first part of the song, “The Silver Flower pt. 1,” which is the perfectly ambient buildup to its second half. This album is still in Pre-Order status, but if you look at the bottom after the tracks, you will see a shit ton of really great reviews and I think that it really deserves it. I recommend it for fans of Dimmu Borgir’s For All Tid.
Wes
Old Gray - “I Still Think About Who I Was Last Summer”
I feel like I had maybe heard this album before, and had forgotten about it. It’s too bad, because it is such an excellent album and I can’t wait to spend some more time with it. This song has so much feeling to it; it oozes emotion, wearing its tears on its sleeve. Ironically, it’s exactly the type of music that I would have hated as a teenager. It seems all my teenage anger has been replaced by something that is at once more gentle and more brutal than any anger. This piece builds and builds, climaxing with pained screams before cutting away to spoken word, gentle guitar plucking an atmosphere away behind the melancholic words.
PROGRAMM - “Soft Shadows”
This is an interesting little piece. In “Soft Shadows” PROGRAMM mixes a lot of different influences. There’s the deep synth basses and repetition that might be taken from some noise or industrial influence, then there is the chorus-heavy vocal samples and guitars that sound like they pull from dark wave, and then layered over the top of all of this are ethereal vocals that sound straight out of some mid to late 2000’s indie electro. On paper, it sounds like these disparate influences wouldn’t mix, but the way PROGRAMM puts them together, it’s hard to not get swept up in the repetition and ghostly sounds.