--Ada Wofford
----Released 1 January 2021
The title alone should tip you off, this band is a little quirky. The terrific cartoon album art should also tip you off, this band is fun. But holy shit, nothing prepares you for the actual music, which is yes, both quirky and fun, but also downright fantastic. It's like if Beirut and The Violent Femmes formed some ramshackle band, dropped a healthy dose of acid, and joined the Elephant 6 Collective. In addition to your standard guitar, bass, and drums, there's viola, clarinet, trombone, trumpet, and synths galore. It's a total kaleidoscope of sound and not a single note of it sounds forced or superfluous.
The way I write all my reviews is by listening to the album with a little notebook in hand, and I write whatever pops into my head for each track. The two words I wrote the most while listening to this album were "pretty" and "catchy." That's really the best way to sum it up. The music is fun, unique, grandiose at times, somber at times, but always pretty and always catchy. Sure, the band might have a penchant for ¾ (but who among us doesn't?), and the uninitiated might zero in on the Neutral Milk Hotel influence (because they never even heard The Gerbils), but to focus on that is to miss the point entirely. Ghoul Friends pull from familiar influences for sure, but they've constructed a world that is entirely their own. The insane pop of "Dubble Bubble" is a good example of this. It sounds like a million things you've heard before but also like nothing you've ever heard before, all at the same time. The dueling vocals, the staccato keys knifing your ears, the so-sweet-my-teeth-hurt melodies—it's pure pop and it's pure anti-pop. Either way, it's a hell of a good time! I would love to hear this performed live; it must be a true banger being blasted in a basement full of sweaty drunks.
I briefly mentioned the instrumentation on display on the album; when I reached out to the band to ask them about their gear and recording process, they had this to say:
The synths I (Vera Small) used are the Korg Minilogue, the Arturia
Microfreak, and the Moog Werkstatt. For processing I used my Roland
555 sampler a bit, and then we also used an old organ. As for like
cool gear for recording, there's not much I can think of that stands
out, but if they're interested, we mostly used Neve preamps, an SSL G
series console, and some Neumann mics. On the songs with acoustic guitar, we mic'd a Vox-AC30 and the guitar up close
We play with a stripped down drum set with just a crash, floor tom, and
snare, no kick. We recorded the crash separate from the floor tom, and
snare, and really tried to give it a marching band crash feel. After
recording the main parts of the songs, we played around a bit figuring
out what would be fun additions. For example, our viola player got a
really cool sound from bowing the cymbal in "Middle of Night," he also
played saw bits on that song and "Ghoul Friends."
90% of the album was recorded at the Drexel studios where Vera was a
student, we probably needed one more day to finish up recording when
the pandemic hit and we couldn't return, so I had to record the trumpet
player, do vocals for three of the songs, add shakers, and random
percussion in my closet. I had been listening to a lot of girl
group (probably my favorite genre) at the start of the pandemic and
really wanted to turn "Why Don't We Break Up" into a Phil Spector-esque
song, so I bought castanets and a cabasa. The cabasa worked out pretty
well. Really thought it'd be cool to have castanets throughout the
song, but turns out they aren't something you can learn overnight. We
did include them in the intro and soaked them in reverb and I think it
does help set the tone for the song.
You can really hear the care and experimentation that went into making this album. But more importantly, you can hear the fun that they're having. This is a jubilant, joyous album. Even the more somber tracks like "Middle of the Night" and "Try to" still have a bit of joy in them. If you like quirky music, full of interesting instrumentation, and chock full of energy and joy, then you absolutely have to check out this album. Purchase on BandCamp and listen to "Ghoul Friends" below:
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