ALBUM REVIEW: Ghostlight – Poets of the Fall
In 2008, Finnish rock sextet POETS OF THE FALL released a cover of the late Chris Cornell‘s James Bond theme, You Know My Name. It felt a perfect foil to the original version in all the right ways. Vocalist Marko Saaresto‘s smooth and sinister baritone was excellently suited to a song all about danger and the sexy, dangerous world of maniacal masterminds and devil-may-care secret agents. The band, too, delivered a more straightforward but fittingly epic and grandiose take on the track. The realization that followed hearing this track, and every subsequent POETS OF THE FALL album is this: every track this band has written past and present could be a Bond theme. The band just seems to always land in that Goldilocks zone of just enough cheese, with just enough edge and the right amount of talent to craft song after song in their own Bond-rock genre. And most importantly, it’s worked – albeit to varying degrees. Though each album cycle has certainly delivered mixed results on the high and low end of this formula, the band’s new album, Ghostlight, their ninth, is delightfully one of the best albums they’ve made in years, and arguably their best record since their debut.
That debut, Signs Of Life, is an album with hooks so massive on each and every song that there isn’t a skippable track on it. And it should be no surprise that it translated into writing epic, theatrical set-pieces: the band got their start after being contracted to write their song Late Goodbye for the now classic game Max Payne. But those hooks and epic tendencies ebb and flow from album to album, and nothing seemed to recapture the magic of that first record. Fortunately, Ghostlight bucks that trend right out of the gate with opener Firedancer. Its pop beat and superb production are a sign of things to come, and it is immediately apparent that this track would make an excellent epic TV show intro, or serve as the background for the trailer of a hyped up video game. Its darkly hypnotic hook and chorus highlight the fact that frontman Marko Saaresto is one of the best kept vocal secrets in the scene. He hasn’t lost a single step over the years, and that’s no exception on this record.
The first two thirds of this record are very good. Requiem For My Harlequin is unabashedly lush and theatrical, complete with a Tom Morello-esque guitar solo and full orchestra punctuations. Sounds Of Yesterday is the first of a few slightly cheesy ballads, but damn it if it isn’t catchy as hell. It’s the most delicious kind of cheese – think AEROSMITH‘s I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing vibes. Revelations brings a stellar guitar performance from Olli Tukiainen, whose tone delivers some serious Slash sounding wails. His work, along with that of rhythm guitarist Jaska Makinen, deserves a great deal of praise across the entire record. The guitar work is definitely a highlight.
Heroes And Villains is more sugary goodness, but the smooth and pleasing vocals go exactly where you want them to and hit that soft sweet spot. Lust For Life brings yet another goosebump-inducing solo that feels in the vein of some of the best, and most underrated, simple guitar solos of the 80s, like on HEART‘s Alone. The smooth yacht rock feel on this track is an interesting but not unwelcome test of range for the band. From this point, the record does take a bit of a downturn, however. Chasing Echoes is pretty meat and potatoes POETS OF THE FALL, but its chorus is good enough that it saves it from fading into the background. But the next two tracks, Weaver Of Dreams and Hello Cabaret overstay their welcome and push the album to the point of being too ballad-heavy. On top of that, the hooks fall away and the tracks are longer than they should be. They’re a bit of a snooze.
Album finale Beyond The Horizon certainly wakes the record up with the most Bond-y feeling song of the whole record (and that’s saying something). Saaresto sounds excellent here and delivers one of his best performances of the album, but the song takes way too long to get to the payoff. It’s too long of a build-up to arrive where it’s going, and unfortunately that drains a lot of the energy away from the track and closes the album in slightly lacklustre fashion.
Despite the fumbles at the ending of this album, POETS OF THE FALL more than makes up for them with a great first two-thirds. The songs are the perfect soundtrack to everyone’s inner action hero opening credits, with the perfect amount of hooky cheese and driving aggressiveness to create a nice fantastical escape into emotion and fun. It’s an excellent balm to the, albeit necessary, hyper serious times and a reminder that those inner dreams of being our own action heroes aren’t so far away. And for POETS OF THE FALL, it’s a record that nearly succeeds in recapturing the magic of their debut, which is a hefty feat in itself.
Rating: 8/10
Ghostlight is out now via Playground Music.
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