Cultural references run up the flagpole on Ghost Palace include Deep Purple’s “Space Truckin’” buskers covering Lynryd Skynyrd and Ed Sheeran, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and The Ramones’ Leave Home album.
Album opener “Celebrities in Cemeteries” encounters Jim Morrison in Père-Lachaise, the do-it-yourself funeral ceremony for Gram Parsons at Joshua Tree and a cemetery in Oklahoma reserved exclusively for circus performers. Contemplating this travelogue, The Burning Hell’s hopeful Mathias Kom sings “They’ll all come see me where I’m buried, Once anonymous and nameless, I’ll be posthumously famous.” Acknowledging the limited time each of us has on this planet is core to Ghost Palace.
The most telling reference is to American academics/architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, whose 1972 book Learning From Las Vegas, written with Steven Izenour, hypothesised that commercial structures were as significant as formally designed architecture. Meaning was everywhere, even if it wasn’t intended. Ghost Palace’s “Duck vs. Decorated Shed” – taking the book’s key analogy as its title – features the James Thurber-esque lyrics “I’d rather be a duck than a decorated shed, Form and function integrated in my heart and in my head, Every person must decide before they get too old and dead, To be a duck or a decorated shed.” Whatever Kom and Ariel Sharratt, the other mainstay of Canada’s Burning Hell, encounter has a personal impact. What does deciding to have a “bottle of chianti, cheese and charcuterie board” signify? It may not be obvious, but import is there.
Each of the 11 erudite, questioning songs is spiked with a downbeat humour which is neither cynical or graceless. Confoundingly, considering its craft, this is a very sprightly album. Jaunty, even. Musically, the nods to The Modern Lovers and third/fourth album Velvet Underground exhibited on the band’s previous nine LPs are still here. But electropop and a B-52’s-like jitteriness are also embraced, as is country: Kom is a fan of Roger Miller. From this perspective, with its raft of guest musicians, Ghost Palace – which appears have a pointed representation of the Ukrainian flag on its cover – is The Burning Hell’s most stylistically all-encompassing album so far. Taken on its own, however, it is a warm, wonderful celebration of how the songwriter can help interpret an increasingly unfathomable world.
