Ghost Bath is slowly drifting towards its new album.
Still signed to Nuclear Blast, Dennis “Nameless” Mikula (vocals/guitar/keyboards, If I Could Kill Myself), accompanied by Mike Heller (drums, Amahiru, Black Hole Deity, Malignancy, ex-Fear Factory…) announces the release of his fifth album, Rose Thorn Necklace.
The album kicks off with Grotesque Display, a gentle keyboard introduction that lets us re-enter the band’s melancholy before the eponymous track, Rose Thorn Necklace, plunges us into its tenebrous tones. If the leads are calm at first, they are set ablaze by the rhythm and the appearance of the equally terrifying vocal parts, weaving an almost frightening but captivating picture where cavernous growl answers to howls of distress, but the end of the track allows us a moment of calm again before joining Well, I Tried Drowning. The track returns to DSBM’s roots, placing heavy riffs over sometimes livelier patterns, reinforcing the omnipresent contrast with moments of dread, but quietude resurfaces on Thinly Sliced Heart Muscle where a guitar slowly lulls us, joining a few keyboards to finally let us drift to Dandelion Tea, which adds saturation to this lament. The vocalist chokes, but the composition takes on different hues, heavier but also more aggressive, creating a kind of crazy jerky dance before reaching Vodka Butterfly, which remains in this abrasive vein before integrating some rather disconcerting, more modern tones. Tears allow us to breathe before the nightmare begins again, ever more invasive until it’s broken by the darkness of Stamen and Pistil, which plunges us back into its ocean of pain, and we find ourselves once again trapped between its riffs, its howls, and above all its viscerality. Rafael « Chewie » Dobbs (Detraktor) joins the duo for an instrumental piano interlude called Needles, which anchors itself in a rather gentle sadness before Throat Cancer grabs us in turn to drag us down one last time, alternating screams and samples under an oppressive rhythm to definitively erase any trace of joy from our minds, finally letting us return to the surface with a ghostly melody that fades into nothingness.
Ghost Bath has always offered a distinctive universe rooted in gripping DSBM, and while the roots are still observable, Rose Thorn Necklace is different, offering a deeper opening, like a wound that never quite closes.
85/100