http://metalnexus.net/review-ghost-bath ... ck-stream/

So Ghost Bath are back with a new album. The last one seemed to divide those who heard it. Some said it was just a copy of Deafheavens Sunbather (and those who already hated that record obviously disliked Ghost Bath also) while other thought it had more depth than just being copy cats. I am one who thought it was excellent and that the musicianship and thought process behind the tracks were on a different level compared to Deafheaven (even though they obviously travel through the same territory).

So far there is one new song released, linked in the article above, and it does show promise but with a glaring error. What did they think when they included the melodic part that first starts at 01:30? Not only is it a blatant copying of their own (excellent) track Golden Number (01:47) from Moonlover it is also a really crappy melody. Not only do they copy themselves, they do so with a vastly inferior melody line. I don't get it. Was there no quality control? The rest of the track is fine to me but rarely have I heard a song where the overall impression has been dragged down so much from one little riff or melody line.

I'm not sure if I look forward to hearing the rest or not... :-/

This band was better when they were from China.

I'm more concerned with this album being 71 minutes long. One of the edges Moonlover has over Sunbather is that it's noticeably shorter (one of the things Deafheaven would correct themselves with their followup). I don't think I want to listen to over an hour of this.

Moonlover was seriously excellent. Pretty interested to see how this turns out. But yeah 71 minutes is too long for pretty much any album. In don't know why bands do this.

edit: oh shit they are on Nuclear Blast now? I was a little concerned when I saw that, but the production actually sounds really awesome.

I enjoyed Moonlover quite a bit. I really dig the album art for this one.

I like this band a lot. Looking forward to this!

Media hype. And I won't expect this overrated band, there are more depressive/post-black metal bands way better than Ghost Bath.

+1. 71 minutes is too much for this stuff(and well, for almost every style).

The new song´s production is perfect, artwork is good as the track is but it has some sections which I don´t enjoy too much. Lets hope that the álbum is better.


I don´t see the comparison with Deafheven.

I have to say the new song had some parts that were a bit cheesy. I know that they had similar parts on Moonlover, but it felt a bit forced to me on this one, like they said "oh we gotta put a pop punk sounding part here".

Today I discovered that Ghost Bath isn't a joke band, that they're signed to Nuclear Blast and that there's a bunch of you who actually like them. Whoa.

Life is full of surprises!

That Thrones single is a jarring clusterfuck of pop punk melodies & blastbeats with distant goat screams on top. An interesting combination to say the least.

Massively overrated and exceedingly dull.

Wow, this "Thrones" song is absolutely fucking atrocious. Basically everything I hate about this style of metal in one - overproduced, over-layered, too polished for extreme music, lots of goofy sound effects. Fuck, it's bad.

Very few albums warrant 71 minutes. The digital age has given a lot of compromise to musicians who wanna needlessly wank off longer than what most people can sit around and take. I like that vinyl and other physical formats had a bit of a limitation so it forced you to reconsider or else your crap has to be a double or triple LP.

Are you a fan of their previous release or do you dislike this style in general?

It's pretty hard to take seriously a band that once pretended to be Chinese and admits they have no lyrics while also claiming that the songs "deal with Jewish angelology" or some shit.

I liked Deafheaven, which this was compared to, and never heard anything else by these guys before.

New track:



I love the second part of this song. So simple - so effective. Got my hopes up quite a bit And I've been listening to the Thrones track as well and I like everything in it except the part I described in the initial post. So far, so good....

There's a lot of hate for this band. Seriously, the whole China thing was a joke people need to get over it! It was misquoted in an interview that they are from North Dakota so jokingly they said might as well be from china. Moonlover was one of my favs from last year and hopefully Starmourner will be just as good. These guys sound nothing like deafheaven.

I just don't get the point of this. Listening to "Thrones" now and there is no atmosphere at all. No emotion nor imagery is evoked. It's just kinda there. Call me crazy but I think atmospheric black metal should, you know, have atmosphere.

Wrong, wrong, and... wrong.

So the Chinese album, songs and band member names on their early releases are a result of said quote taken out of context as well?

At any rate, I sampled a few studio and live snippets a while ago and found them laughably terrible, so as far as I'm concerned there was not much for such a retarded publicity stunt to ruin from the get go. If people dig 'em, good news for them. There are worse things in life.

this band is doo doo haha

I'm surprise the Chinese gimmick is such a big thing for some (it must be because it is constantly brought up when this band is discussed). I kind of wish they had stuck with that idea and built something larger based on that. But in the end I like them because of the music of course. I think I heard them before I heard of the gimmick actually. But they do seem like a band where there is not much in between. You either like them or you don't. The only thing I wish they would change is the vocals. I'm not a huge fan of the DSBM vocal style.

So...how was it?

As far as I can tell, there's not a YouTube rip or Spotify version up, and nobody on this site has reviewed it yet...I think that's fair enough justification for me to ask.

It amazes me how much time some people spend just to speak sh*t about bands they don´t like.

Well, it's a "big thing" because is exemplifies the farce that black metal has, in many ways, become. It's ironically not about the music when it boils down to a lot of this, but tangential posturing to fit a particular kvlt-standard that seems to sell the band to the mindless as much as the music itself. It becomes something it shouldn't be about, and it's oftentimes based on pure fabrication.

For people with their head on their shoulders I think black metal was always a farce though - that some took seriously. Obviously it might have been hard to see it that way if one was about the same age as the musicians around the time of the second wave (go back and read some Euronomyous interviews for example). I think black metal today, not just referring to fringe bands like Ghost Bath, is way more mature and a lot less farcical than ever really.

I never heard Moonlover, only their debut Funeral and judging by this "Ambrosial" track, this band has improved at least a little bit. The debut was basically solid but way too overlong considering how little variety (the metal parts of) the album had. The folk "chinese" interludes were just godawful too. The actual BM riffing seems to have improved by now, and the vocalist is thankfully expanding beyond the DSBM shrieks to more growling. I don't have a problem with the DSBM vocals, but they're not appropriate for this band to use exclusively, considering how downright happy their music sounds half the time. Ghost Bath is really good at those plaintive guitar melodies/noodles, almost gives their music a cathartic skramz/emo vibe.

I'll definitely check this out, but the fact that it's 70 minutes makes me cautious. It'll probably be a little better than Funeral, but not by as much as I'd hope, considering the time that has passed.

Well... It's not out till April 21st according to the video, so...

I enjoyed Ambrosial way more than Thrones. The song evolves in a very satisfying way, especially leading into that droning section. Contrary to most others, I actually like the usage of DSBM shrieks by these guys, which is funny because I am generally not a fan of that style at all. They aren't really in your face, they just blend into the music. And yeah Exodus, I agree there's definitely an emo vibe with the music. I know that will definitely rub some people the wrong way, but I happen to really enjoy it when it works.

...Oh crap, I wrote "March 21" in my calendar... it also doesn't help that they promoted the album in March and haven't done any more as of late...

It's pretty easy to impress me when it comes to metal (for pete's sake, I took a small liking to Sonata Arctica's latest album!), so I think I'll end up impressed with most of their songs. What does concern me, like what TheExodusAttack said, was the runtime. I thought that Moonlover had a perfect runtime at 42 minutes, and on the other side of the spectrum, I can barely remember what Funeral was like, and that was an hour long. Hopefully the music is creative and juicy enough to keep me going through the album, but we'll see when it's released.

Okay, so NOW it's out. Ffs, gotta learn to check the date properly.

I haven't heard a lot (been listening on Spotify on occasion and w/o premium), but it's not all that bad... some of the songs are pretty good and atmospherical, and on a few songs Mikula actually does real black metal screams instead of whatever the heck he normally does (not that this album is black metal). I think they've improved, but not enough for a Ghost Bath hater to finally like it.

well i listened to it and i have to say the first immpresions are not very positive.I mean,ok the production is fantastic but that's about it.Also the melodies on this album are really strange they sound waaaaaaaay to happy for a black metal album(ok,post-black metal in this case) espacially the song "Cherubim" like seriouslly this song sounds more like a pop rock song than post black metal.Oh yeah the vocals ruin some of good moments of this album and don't really fit with the mood of a lot of the songs.

Same here.

If you think Ghost Bath and their China gambit was an attempt to tap into the kvlt market, boy are you barking up the wrong tree.

What was their attempt then? It's interesting to see what kind of mental leaps their fans are willing to take in order to justify the band's blatant and failed attempt at gimmicky hipster credibility. I also bet a lot of fans wish they could still say they are "listening to Chinese black metal" because "it's soooo obscure".

I dislike them for an entirely different reason. They basically got popular because of Bandcamp, then blamed Bandcamp for the whole China thing (in an interview they said it was Bandcamp's fault for making them enter a location) and then they signed with a label that isn't on Bandcamp and then deleted Moonlover off of the site, despite it being one of the best-selling metal albums of all time on the platform. The whole thing is basically a big "fuck you" to the fans that supported them and the platform that helped them get recognized.