Ghost is a Japanese experimental/psychedelic band/collective/loosely affiliated experience, and it’s spiritual center is guitarist and vocalist Masaki Batoh.
Since it formed in 1984, the band has released eight studio albums, as well as a slew of side projects, solo albums, live albums, and the like. Ghost in all its various permutations is quite consistent — I haven’t heard anything from them that I’d classify as bad — but there’s enough material that a scorecard is still helpful. So for the curious, here’s a list of some of Ghost’s most interesting or successful projects.
Damon & Naomi with Ghost [Sub Pop]
Dream pop duo Damon & Naomi have had a longstanding relationship with Ghost, beginning with a Masaki Batoh cover on their album Playback Singers in 1998. Both bands were in love with the alternately gentle and cracked genius of Tom Rapp, and Pearls Before Swine hovers over this 2000 collaboration, a highlight of both band’s career. The pop structures force Ghost to curb its more formless excursions…but you can still hear those experimental impulses pushing at the edge of Damon & Naomi’s twee songs. Damon and Masaki Batoh’s acoustic guitars weave and trickle around Kazuo Ogin’s keyboard drone on the slow trance of “The Great Wall,” while Michio Kurihara spatters psychedelic classic rock guitar all over “I Dreamed of the Caucuses. “Tanka” neatly encapsulates both bands; strengths, starting out as dreamy lullaby and shifting halfway through into Television-style guitar freak out.
Michio Kurihara - Sunset Notes [Pedal Records]
Longtime Ghost member Michio Kurihara is probably one of the all-time great guitarists. If you doubt, this 2005 album is the evidence; though there are touches of drums and organs, this is one long showcase. On “Do Deep-Sea Fish Dream of Electric Moles?” tongue-in-cheek anthemic almost-march-tempo licks alternate with mean-spirited growling fuzz, like wild dingos accidentally let loose in a parade. “Twilight Mystery of a Russian Cowboy” is an adrenalin-charged Morricone pastiche with Kurihara sounding like Dick Dale drenched in acid (or Acid Mothers Temple). “The Old Man and the Evening Star” is a loose variation on the melody of “These Three Kings,” which Kurihara toys with, dodges, and caresses in seven and a half minutes of lyrical bliss. The whole album is filled with humor, surprises, intelligence, and bad ass playing.
Masaki Batoh - Collected Works 1995-1996 [Drag City]
Batoh’s 2008 collaboration with multi-intrumentalist Helena Espvall got more press (and is great in itself), but I think I prefer this 2005 solo outing. Again, Tom Rapp is a touchstone for many songs, as well as other fey folk like Nick Drake and Robyn Hitchcock. At moments, though, Batoh seems close to surpassing even such eminent sources. “World of Pain,” at least, couldn’t be much more perfect — from Batoh’s odd English pronunciation; to the bleak swirls of acoustic guitar, like gusts of snow seen through glass; to the false ending three quarters through, a momentary crescendo that tries to stop and then almost immediately stumbles forward again. Admittedly, I’m not especially taken with the fourteen minutes of faux-whale-song that makes up “Benthos” — but you have to let the hippies love their Cetaceans, I guess. “Magakami” is a more enjoyable experimental effort; a head-nodding hippie trance, the first part of which sounds suspiciously like someone let loose a flock of kazoos in the drum circle.
Ghost - Hypnotic Underworld [Drag City]
Ghost albums are as much about atmosphere as songs, which means they tend (not unpleasantly) to blur into each other. This is the first one I heard, though, and I think it remains my favorite. The towering 23-minute opening suite (collectively titled “Hypnotic Underworld”) is high quality psychedlia. The first two parts could almost be Sun Ra: part one, “God Took a Picture of His Illness on the Ground,” is abstract drifting with horn calls and the occasional beat starting up only to dissipate with ambience; the second, “Escaped and Lost Down in Medina,” is a groovy roll with spaced-out filigree. Part 3, though, “Aramaic Barbarous Dawn,” sounds like heavy Brit pop — maybe Sells Out era Who — while “Leave the World!” ends the set with 22 seconds of driving rock squall. “Hazy Paradise” is lounge-meets-dream-pop in a way that’s quintessentially Japanese. “Ganagmanag” has a sinuous Middle Eastern vibe — “Holy High” points to India. It all drifts together into a trippy blissed-out mellow, rescued from bland jam-band boredom by the creativity of the borrowing and Batoh and Kuchihara’s technical mastery.
As for other Ghost efforts, Lama Rabi Rabi, from 1996 is great, especially “Rabirabi”, where Tibetan chant meets rock stud awesomeness in a way that must have Jim Morrison wishing in his grave that he’d played with a guitarist like Michio Kurihara. On Snuffbox Immanence from 1999 the band covers the Rolling Stones “Live With Me”, making Keith and Mick sound like they wrote for space aliens performing in Vegas. But really, every Ghost album has gems. There’s no bad place to start.
