Reviews
Album Review: Great American Ghost – Power Through Terror
Furious metallers Great American Ghost deliver a knockout on Power Through Terror…
New Hampshire brutalists Great American Ghost continue to boil over on thumping fourth album
Everything seems to be going to shit for the common man right now, especially in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Rampant economic instability. Ever-widening social division. And an incoming government evidently more interested in hollow populism and kowtowing to the ultra-rich than enacting the change regular citizens are crying out for. Always an unapologetically political band, Great American Ghost have no lack of fuel for the fire on their furious fourth album.
Fire is very much the flavour of Tragedy Of The Commons. From the red hot rat-a-tat riffage and combustible energy of explosive opener Kerosene, the band serve up a musical Molotov cocktail aimed at a callous ruling elite. Echoes Of War wraps its piston-powered bludgeon in forlorn atmospherics. Lost In The Outline rides the searing emotion of its first half into a stomach-lurching second. Forsaken manages to convincingly marry deathcore crunch to honeyed melody. Everything is crushingly heavy, but it’s leavened by real intelligence and depth of feeling.
Radical messages delivered via extreme music is nothing new, of course. But at a time when those so-called ‘radical’ politics feel more necessary than ever, a sense of urgency elevates these songs above those of many metalcore contemporaries. You can feel the poison pulsating through Genocide. A film of filth hangs off the heart-ripping Hymn Of Decay. Rolling hard into savagely scattershot closer God Is A Loaded Gun there’s a sense of loose-limbed hardcore dynamism delivered with death metal stopping-power.
Sadly, the titular tragedy won’t stop unfolding any time soon, but that just makes it all the more rousing to bask in the underdog vitriol and violence of a band like Great American Ghost.
Verdict: 3/5
For fans of: Fit For An Autopsy, Ingested, Bleed From Within
Tragedy Of The Commons is released on January 31 via SharpTone