Ghost Town

'Horror on St Lime's Hill' is a charming, awful, brilliant, hilarious album that succeeds on more levels than I'd ever originally thought it would. To paraphrase a friend of mine, I'm probably one of maybe five people in the world that like the guy, but I'm pretty down with that. It's side splitting stuff that I keep on coming back to.
A big part of that album's charm is that it's somewhat coherent. The production is clear- the drums and guitar in time, have had work put into them, so on and so forth. It succeeds partly because it doesn't sound ridiculously amateurish. Well it does sound amateurish, but it's competent. Hah. Well, I guess the way to put it is that for whatever reason Lime's Hill was made, it was made with patience and love. And it was surprisingly, consistently catchy.

Ghost Town, however, doesn't sound like it was the work of a musical retard/genius slaving over his casio keyboard. Nothing's really in time, the vocals are way out of tune, there's certainly nothing as catching as Raven in the Courtyard, the Lime's Hill title track, it's just a incoherent mess made in the same amount of time as it took to write. I get the feeling that the recording style for this album involved playing the drums, then playing it back through computer speakers and recording it with the guitar, then doing that again with the vocals, etc...

This wouldn't matter though, if the material was there. And to be honest maybe it's there, but the whole thing is so freakin' out of time that it's impossible to tell. The guitars and drums never sit together (something that Damien obviously rectified to a ridiculous/hilarious/awesome extent on St Lime), never in the same tempo, or feel, or anything. Not just 'slightly out of time' but to the point where you have no idea what's happening. It's a complete mess. The usual Storm charm and humour is gone, replaced by a total chaotic mishmash. Guitars move around in a vaguely trad-heavy way, but with the production as bad as it is, with the drums as out of time as they are, with the vocals consisting of vague, out of tune quiet-falsetto mumbling, it's just really not worth listening too. At least Damien rectified most of the faults for his next album.

I'm pretty tired and I know this review sucks, but so does this album. Don't bother trying to track this down. His later stuff is good though and I will personally fight anyone who disagrees!!! :(