A+
I periodically edit these posts to jiggle the grades as my opinions change, but every now and then my opinions change so much I have to reassess my entire review, which it wouldn’t be fair to do without telling anybody. That happened one night as I was reading Giorgio Agamben, who was talking about Gnosticism so I decided to put on Ghost’s recent Gnostic-themed album Meliora as mood music. Oh man, did it set the mood. And galvanized by the mood I soon found myself struggling to focus on my reading because I kept noticing the little details that made it work. Like the whooshing swell of noise that the end of “From the Pinnacle to the Pit” abruptly cuts off, the metronome intro of “Deus In Absentia” which has nothing literal to do with the song but makes perfect atmospheric sense, the little echoing riff on “Mummy Dust” There are even some nice lyrical touches: I can’t believe I somehow read it as failing to critique capitalism when “Absolution”, however vague, is not just a song about guilt or Faustian compacts in a vulgar individualist sense, but about systemic complicity. Their flair for occult imagery and camp has really taken off too: “I was carried on a wolf’s back/to corrupt humanity” is not an “I killed a man because he killed my goat” but it’s that kind of intro for sure, and “star-crossed lovers reaching out/to the beast of many names” is the single most grandiose thing I’ve heard all year.
My initial judgment of it was also explicitly in relation to their previous albums, which on second examination I was also remembering unreliably - Infestissumam particularly only as its ~3 best, most memorable tracks, “Ghuleh/Zombie Queen” (still the best thing they ever wrote), “Monstrance Clock”, maybe “Year Zero”, maybe “Body and Blood”... mostly “Ghuleh/Zombie Queen” though. The rest of that album is filler, even more simplistic than their first and only marginally more atmospheric, though that margin felt like quite a lot the first time you heard it. Every track on Meliora, on the other hand, feels like an attempt to replicate “Ghuleh” and what set it apart from... everything they had previously done. It shows in the progressive song structures, the hooks themselves catchier by virtue of being a little more complex, the more frequent variations in texture, and the hint of melancholy I now can barely remember ever not having been there. It also shows in the sheer amount of care put into each one of these, which is practically as much as most people I’ve reviewed here put into a whole album.
If anything this attentiveness backfires as the singles feel a bit try-hard, “Cirice” in particular - its piano-based hook is jarring and its riffs more serpentine than memorable. They’re not the album’s best tracks, which is a complete reversal of previous Ghost albums and probably threw me when I listened to it the first time. Some of these songs don’t really work until you listen to them in context. “Majesty” demands a throne. Meliora really is a concept album, even if there’s no specific extended narrative, and there are no songs that don’t at least sound like songs on their own. Well, except “Devil Church”, which is an incredible 1 minute and 6 seconds because it steps right up and tells you in no uncertain terms what their musical project is, where it takes off from Black Sabbath and how it completely it humiliates the entire project of “black metal”. Counterintuitively, the things that make them “not metal”, that make them a heavier Blue Oyster Cult or what have you, are exactly the things that make them epic - not just structurally but texturally - and Satanic. Ghost have recreated the sounds of the actual “Devil Church” we attend every day: the mall (anthropologists argue that the 20th-century shopping mall was modelled, consciously or unconsciously, on the cathedral, the only comparable space in terms of scale, crowds, and deliberate coercive evocation of intense emotional experience through every sense: sights, scents, and music), in every tinny, canned chorus, in every sugar-or-crack-rush hook and meticulously produced populist Pavlovian response. They have made a better pop album than any pop artist I can think of this year. But they have infected it with Sabbath’s sense of doom (born of working-class resentment). This, not some edgy Norwegian teenagers hissing at broken mics in a forest, is what the Devil sounds like - or specifically, what the organized worship of the Devil sounds like, which has been their shtick since day one (or year zero). Ghost evokes, condenses and elucidates our full affective experience of the monumental, crumbling immensity of structuring evil in the world around us: both as it presents itself and as we understand - or fail to understand, doubt and tremble before - it. And it’s a hell of a thing to listen to while reading Agamben explaining how “economy” originated as a religious concept.