DM Stith
Heavy Ghost
Asthmatic Kitty
DM Stith’s debut album, plays like the soundtrack to an unmade film by Tim Burton. The title, ‘Heavy Ghost’ seems apt, since each track unleashes a whine of spectral voices from your speakers. Once unshackled, they whip round the room like the ghouls from ‘Ghostbusters’, often to the bleak accompaniment of hammered-out minor chords and experimental jingle jangling.
Stith’s EP ‘Curtain Speech’ garnered much praise and saw him being compared to Jeff Buckley and Andrew Bird. ‘Heavy Ghost’ takes his delicate voice and weaves it through a series of songs that are sometimes very beautiful. ‘Thanksgiving Moon’ and ‘Braid of voices’ are wistful and elegant, occasionally even optimistic.
For the most part, however, the Ghost gets too Gothic. Songs follow a similar journey, starting out gently before thumping a path through portentous wailing and climactic piano chords to… well, nowhere in particular. Smith comes, we are told, from an intensely religious family. Opening track ‘Isaac’s Song’ certainly aggresses the listener like a particularly virulent sermon. In the end too many of Smith’s songs sound like experiments, sketches from a sound effects studio; full of clicking typewriters and clanking chains but with no conclusion.
Despite the grand orchestration and the pleasing weirdness of it all, ‘Heavy Ghost’ never quite sees the light.
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9th Mar 2009 - Tumblr
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