Ghost Bath - Starmourner

Ghost Bath, Starmourner, how are we doing? I’m okay, I thought I would get to this sooner but look at this, two whole weeks after this album came out. Ghost Bath are back with their third album and hopefully ready for whatever talk of the town they’re going to be because they seem to have a knack for stirring discussion, intentionally from some perspectives. The band broke through in 2015 with their second album Moonlover (to which Starmourner is supposedly the first of two planned sequels) as much as an American black metal band really can break through. But surrounding their rise to fame were a few minor talking points. The first was that they had apparently claimed to be from China (ashamed of North Dakota or something?) or allowed people to believe they were from China, I don’t know, I didn’t follow that mess very closely. The second, and most relevant, was the incredible similarity of their sound to the infamous Deafheaven album Sunbather. Some considered their work to be highly unoriginal and essentially just the Shasta Cola version of Sunbather, particularly their album Moonlover. As far as that album is concerned, I can see and do agree to some degree with some assertions that Ghost Bath are kind of just a diet Deafheaven; the former use a very similar blend of post-rock and black metal with song structures and atmospheres clearly reminiscent of Deafheaven’s work, and Moonlover shows it. Because I do really like Deafheaven, I also found Moonlover to be pretty alright. It certainly does lack the depth Sunbather has, but it’s a decent shoegaze-y, bright, black metal album with its shining moment, “Golden Number”, shining beautifully.

Starmourner, while not a terrible album, definitely does not deliver the goods that Moonlover did, and really plays like an album deserving of much less attention than it has received as a result of how infamous the band has become, like American black metal’s Kanye (that analogy doesn’t extend that far, I know). On paper, the band is doing everything that should work in creating the kind of lifting brilliance that Moonlover at its best moments did provide, but there’s really only one thing written on that paper. And that is this album’s weakness, because if Ghost Bath are indeed deeply creative, they hardly show it here. For one, the album is over 70 minutes long and for the vast majority of its runtime, it sounds like one idea looped over a few different songs, which all blend together into a single indistinguishable mesh. This would be fine if this contributed to the meditative, transcendent atmosphere the band was clearly striving for. The album, though, is barely, if at all, immersive and makes itself hard to pay any real attention to. One song that strangely breaks the monotony is “Cherubum”, the first half of which sounds like an embarrassing pop-punk song gone blackgaze, but oddly the song transitions into the album’s most enjoyable instrumental passage that sounds a lot like something Deafheaven might have used on New Bermuda. One thing that returned on this album that did somewhat plague Moonlover was the indecipherable and unnecessary “tortured screaming” background-ish vocal style. While George Clarke’s lyrics are often impossible to hear without reading along and learning from the lyric sheet, his impassioned screams add a constructive instrumental element to Deafheaven’s music, whereas on Ghost Bath’s albums the sometimes goofiness of the wailing vocals is often distracting and they never achieve what they seem to be intended for. The album unfortunately doesn’t give itself much else worth talking about; it’s by no means a showcase of instrumental virtuosity or of lyrical genius (as far as I can tell). The worst thing about this album is that it’s so bland, not even disgusting or unpalatable, just plain and unexciting, which is the exact opposite of what this band seems to be trying to achieve here and the opposite of what made Sunbather such an inspiration to myself and probably them. I hope they can muster something more riveting on the third installment they have planned, because Starmourner sounds like a band out of the few ideas they had.