Just got this from an old buddy of ours Andrew Auld.... Hes got a cool blog in the works called Big Wreckage, thatll have a bunch of insightful BW related stuff.... Ill keep you posted. REAL GOOD STUFF!!! Although “Ghosts” will likely be the most divisive track on the new album, it’s really not that jarring after a second listen and a familiarity with of Big Wreck’s full catalog, and more importantly, an understanding of Ian Thornley’s chief influences. Everything you hear in “Ghosts” you’ve heard a hundred times before. No, really—the bass line burps to the beat of your favourite 70’s funk classic and the guitars pulse as if they were cut specifically for Floyd, Nicks, Survivor, or any combination of the three. However, there’s a depth to “Ghosts” that allows all of these influences to converge in a space where they are never hackneyed or clichéd. “Ghosts” begins with a reverberated clean guitar pattern that stutters like a skipping record or a false start. The drums stir in, the bass belches. The listener is immediately thrown into an homage to so many of Ian’s influences that it gets a bit distracting with a first listen. The muted guitar that permeates the verse is akin to Stevie Nicks’s “Edge of Seventeen” in its repetition, but it leans on Pink Floyd’s “Young Lust” for a really deep groove and this ensures that the riff never becomes rote. The vocals are appropriately haunting and wet with reverb for a song called “Ghosts” and in the background of the verses, delayed clean and acoustic guitar tracks dart in and out so ephemerally that they can be hard to catch—they add so much dimension! Once again, there’s just so much depth to this track! One of the peculiarities of this track is how important the bass guitar is to the execution of the song. Knowing Big Wreck’s full catalog it’s understood that counterpoint bass melodies abound, but “Ghosts” takes bass to a different level. In “Ghosts”, Dave is playing so much more than counterpoint melody on the bass—he’s responsible for keeping Ian’s rhythm pattern from straying towards the kitschy. Coupled, Ian’s muted rhythm pattern and Dave’s woody funk approach create SUCH a fresh take on what we’ve all heard before. As the chorus hits, there’s so much space for everything that the band orchestrates. There’s heaps of vocal depth, breathing room for an essential bass melody, and still plenty of space for yet another intricate delayed guitar pattern. The guitar rips through a whammy effect as the song enters the bridge. That warm, woody bass groove of the verse carries through to the bridge section/guitar solo, except with this go around it’s way more pronounced and it anchors and punctuates Ian’s first guitar solo so well! As for the glass-like guitar solo, it’s so precisely imprecise that it’s really hard to explain— there are nods to Vaughan, Buchanan, and King, but it’s way more measured and clean than any of those Giants. His notes rise and fall and his bends get downright ugly! A flurry of terse micro-bends bleed into the final chorus. The second solo—the outro—picks up where the first solo leaves off, except things start to get real muddy and fuzzy, not entirely unlike the solo in “Control”. However, in this iteration there is just so much more ugliness and tension… there also seems to be an odd static quality to the fuzz used on this lead bit. This creates an apt, ghost-like quality that haunts the end section as the song walks out. Overall, “Ghosts” is a jarring surprise for Big Wreck Fans because it combines so many familiar (and at first blush trite) song elements. However, the song grows as its own inimitable being. “Ghosts” is not so much a copy of works-gone-by as it is an homage to them… Ghosts is an instant classic, in part, because it is made of classics. -Andrew Auld
Posted on: Fri, 04 Apr 2014 19:12:25 +0000
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