Love Ghost ‘Venganza Del Fantasma’
Inside one’s mind is a maze and a great mystery. A town of ghosts and demons holding all your secrets. The living don’t like to go there. They live in the sun. They smile and act, not so different from one another, but behind each face and body, they casted a long shadow, where the world’s greatest love and sharpest loss lives—and that’s where Love Ghost begin their storytelling. On their latest EP, venganza del fantasia (Ghost’s Vengeance), the four-piece alternative rock band delve deep into the realm of consciousness.
The four-song EP explores the duality of Spanish and English, alternative rock and hip hop. Emo peaks angsty vulnerability throughout. Grunge gives it a pulsing undertone of extremism and misery, like the spirit and blood running through the vein. In the illusive, fainting distortion of a backdrop, frontman Finnegan Bell’s haunting, intimate vocal details the angst, the craze, the emo, and the loss of all control.
Lyrically, the entire album gives out a Jack Kerouac aesthetic. The prose exposes a sense of spontaneity in storytelling, tackling topics like spirituality, love, loneliness, depression, anxiety and different topics of mental health in one sitting. Sometimes it feels like Love Ghost have articulated all the feelings that you didn’t know how to address previously, and the answer is both lyrically and musically. It’s that mixture of feeling, somewhere between deterioration and hopelessness, anguish and sensibility. It’s non-linear and complex with everything all intertwined together like a thread of chaos exploded in a grand mass. Love Ghost is really good at capturing an experience through the perspective of what’s going on inside one’s mind.
Time moves differently in “Ghost Town.” Western Cowboy meets Futuristic Cyber Punk bridges bleakness and sci-fi. At the verge of slow burn and great intensity, Love Ghost and Santa RM gets you on the edge of your seat at all time. While the extremely well-crafted soundscapes and painfully captivating melodies makes you want to savor every single second of it.
“Inferno” tells its story from the perspective of a psychopath. The thick, mesmerizing guitar riffs instantly drops you into an alternative gangster reality of Los Angeles. The aesthetic of the song is somewhere between Joker and Godfather. Violence and love are intricately intertwined together, and so does warmth and coolness, extreme and vulnerability. It makes your heart ache at the same time giving out the best allure of emo and hip hop.
“ALI3N” and “Pick Myself Apart” reminds you of Machine Gun Kelly, but mainly because both songs have a very specific yet universal sound. “Pick Myself Apart” depicts a hopeless romantic, who is extreme, melancholy, deadly and self-blaming.
Hardly any characters from Love Ghost’s EP is black-and-white. They are all deeply flawed. In the wrong hands, they could very well be labeled as monsters, but Love Ghost see the human side of them. There’s compassion and warmth in their songwriting that connects people together. Through depicting the inner world of these characters, they reflect the different sides of humanity, the different aspect of ourselves.
