Review: Chrome Ghost ‘House Of Falling Ash’
Chrome Ghost’s 2019 album, The Diving Bell, was pretty much my favourite and most played record of that year. I honestly don’t remember how I stumbled across it, but I was instantly hooked on its combination of massive, rumbling bass-driven riffs and super-melodic vocals. The song structures were complex, yet accessible enough for me to recommend it to loads of my friends who similarly took a shine to the Sacramento trio. If you’ve ever listened to Floor and thought ‘wouldn’t it be great if this band occasionally went a bit prog?’ then Chrome Ghost are your new favourite band – bypass the rest of this review and continue straight to Bandcamp where you can purchase their entire back-catalogue and make your life better.
Chrome Ghost’s third and latest album is entitled House Of Falling Ash and is crash-landed into your ears on 28th October courtesy of Seeing Red Records. Although now that I’ve written it, I don’t think ‘crash-landed’ does the music justice – this is so well crafted and at times beautifully played that ‘soars into your consciousness’ is far more appropriate.
I’ll start by saying that Jake Kilgore (possibly the most metal surname of all time) is pretty much my favourite vocalist plying their trade in any branch of metal at the moment. His combination of ethereal and melodic clean singing, together with some top-notch sludge-barking, has had me scouring YouTube on more than one occasion to make sure that it all comes from the same throat – and incredibly, it does. Furthermore, he can deliver in a live setting too, which is a borderline frickin’ miracle.
On top (or more accurately, underneath) of Jake’s vocals and hugely varied guitar playing, we have the sound of the earth moving, as provided by bassist Joe Cooper. This is the sort of bassist that allows a three-piece band of this genre to thrive. He doesn’t just hold down the riff but delivers texture and subtlety at almost every turn. And when he isn’t delivering subtlety, he’s laying down low-end filth that will send most other bands weeping behind their walls of unnecessary Marshall stacks.
Finally, we have drummer Jacob Hurst. I’m not a drummer (I’m an appallingly, contemptibly, untalented guitarist) but Jacob is one of the few tub-thumpers that can lead whole sections of a song – just listen to the middle part of the opening track for evidence of this. I find myself following his playing just as often as I do any other part of the compositions, but this is never in a dickhead-70s drum solo kind of way (and yes, I am looking at you John Bonham) – his playing is hugely musical and establishes mood just as much as the vocals do.
The album opens with the fourteen-minute Rose In Bloom which is all at once the heaviest thing they’ve done and the most progressive (with one particular riff echoing King Crimson’s Discipline), and I very quickly decided that this is the best thing they’ve ever recorded… that was until I heard track two, The Furnace, which pretty much compresses everything good about the band into an eight-and-a-half-minute monster.
an epic ride…
There are touches of Americana in here, similar to what Earth were doing a number of years ago on their The Bees Made Honey album. Subtle but effective use of slide guitar and synths add to the mood whilst never detracting from the feeling that these are very live-in-the-room performances. And whilst this isn’t anything entirely new for the band, the song structures, and the way the light and shade is balanced, feel like it’s at a new level.
In The Tall Grass is a short acoustic interlude which feels like it has been freshly plucked from a 1972 prog time capsule. It develops with the addition of what sounds like a mellotron and then abruptly gives way to the next epic, Where Black Dogs Dream. This track feels like a natural link between their previous album and this one. The vocal harmonies that defined The Diving Bell are brilliantly used here. This is the lightest of the epic tracks on offer, but it never loses its way for a second.
We then move on to Bloom (Reprise) which for ninety seconds does exactly what it says on the tin as it reintroduces the motif we heard in the opening track. It quietly rumbles along with the accompanying, almost military, drums. It is a moment of respite before the final epic.
Now here’s where I’m going to prove myself to be a fair critic and not just a pandering fanboy – as I’ve had one problem with the final track, House Of Falling Ash, since I first heard it. After several seconds of total silence at the end of Bloom (Reprise), the track opens with a distorted and screamed vocal which quite frankly scared the living shit out of me the first time around!
There I was, quite happily listening via headphones in that late night half-awake state that I’m sure the parents amongst you are very familiar with, only to be genuinely startled out of my chair by the change in dynamics between the last two tracks. The harsh vocal then continues over the top of clean/acoustic guitars for the first thirty seconds before being matched tonally by some more distorted guitars. Despite this (perhaps deliberately) jarring opening to the song, House Of Falling Ash goes on to deliver an epic ride that measures up to what’s gone before, and despite my low-level PTSD from the first listen, I’ve come to rate this track just as highly as the rest of the album. The opening and closing tracks provide fantastic bookends, being the longest and most adventurous of their career to date.
I was really hoping that House Of Falling Ash would match up to The Diving Bell. What I didn’t dare hope for is a record that pretty much surpasses it in every way. The production is fantastic, the songwriting has taken a step beyond what they’ve done before, and they’ve clearly used that good-old lockdown that we’ve all tried to forget about to become ever better musicians. This is a record that will flirt with the top spots on many ‘best of 2022’ lists, and not just in metal circles either. It’ll certainly take something truly special to knock it off the top of mine.
Label: Seeing Red Records
Band Links: Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram
Scribed by: David J McLaren
