ALBUM REVIEW: Ghost At The Gallows – Spirit Adrift
SPIRIT ADRIFT don’t take days off. With five studio albums, three EPs and two compilations in just eight years, there’s not a single fan who can complain of starvation. Whilst Nate Garrett’s studio side project has long since become its own beast, last year’s semi-covers album 20 Centuries Gone felt like a band beginning to burn out. Like selling pizzas, if quality can’t keep up with quantity, you’ll fall behind. Ghost At The Gallows, like 2020’s Enlightened In Eternity and 2021’s Forge Your Future EP, is a deep dish pizza made with a flavoursome 70s hard rock and 80s NWOBHM sauce, topped with spiritualism, existentialism, and grief, and finished with an overstuffed cheese crust of riffs, riffs, and you guessed it, more riffs. On paper, it sounds perfect; on record, it lacks depth.
Subconsciously inspired by the passing of family members, friends, pets, and fellow musicians — such as POWER TRIP’s Riley Gale and THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER’s Trevor Strnad — Garrett uses Ghost At The Gallows as a monologue on death and the great beyond, told from the different stages of the grieving process. The bluesy, doomy balladeering of These Two Hands paints a picture of grief’s darker times — “Everyday I wake up paralysed / We did all we could to keep you alive / Learn to live without you by my side / Wishing I am the one who died” — to hauntingly heavy effect, whilst Give Her To The River goes round the houses, saying a little with a lot when they’ve could’ve maximised the powerful one-liner “In the fire we transform, in the water be reborn” which says it best.
Ghost At The Gallows is bookended by two seven-minute monoliths — Give Her To The River and the title track — however neither justifies their runtime, instead exposing SPIRIT ADRIFT’s achilles heel: overindulgence. Just like Augustus Gloop in the chocolate fountain, these tracks sacrifice a diet of substance in favour of indulging in their favourite thing: unleashing power chords so pretty you’ll shut your eyes and see yourself travelling down the Rainbow Road.
The singles — Barn Burner, Death Won’t Stop Me and I Shall Return — are the standouts, and they all share the same secret: they’re straight-up arena-ready heavy metal bangers. Barn Burner burns the house down, soaking the track in kerosene-loaded solos and setting fire to the sound of Michael Arellano’s machine-gun drums; whilst Death Won’t Stop Me and I Shall Return lean into The Hunter-era MASTODON, where they douse death in a shroud of groove-driven stoner-rock with stadium-sized choruses.
Hanged Mans Revenge could reach similar heights, however its chorus leaves a lot to be desired, and its overreliance on a heavy metal trope feels like new dogs being taught old tricks, whilst the psychedelic-doom and pavement-pounding drumbeats of Siren Of The South are too at odds with each other to be anything but artists throwing spaghetti at walls, with some of it sticking and some of it flopping back into the pot.
If you order Ghost At The Gallows for dinner, a flavoursome pizza from Naples you will not find. But if you’re looking to eat nothing but the meatiest riffs you’ve ever seen in your life until your full to bursting, then SPIRIT ADRIFT have made the album for you. Sure, it’s a good time, but this many albums in, shouldn’t it be a great time?
Rating: 7/10
Ghost At The Gallows is set for release on August 18th via Century Media Records.
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