Personnel: Devin Townsend (vocals, guitar, banjo, synthesizer); Katrina Natale (vocals); Dave Young (mandolin, harmonium, keyboards); Kat Epple (flute, woodwinds); Mike St-Jean (drums, percussion).
Audio Mixer: Devin Townsend.
Recording information: RecRoom Studio (2010); The Factory (2010); The Shit Shack (2010).
Photographer: Brian Kibbons.
The fourth and final volume in a series of releases industrial-metal guitarist/producer Devin Townsend has been working on since 2009, Ghost is the softest, quietest release he's ever been involved with. The dominant instruments are acoustic guitar, synth, and flute, and the vocals are gently crooned rather than screamed or howled. Drums are brushed as often as hit with sticks, and a female vocalist provides counterpoint to Townsend. Some of the songs still run to self-indulgent lengths ("Feather" drifts past the 11-minute mark, for no good reason), but a lot of these tracks are concise and pretty little numbers. "Blackberry" is like an industrial-tinged take on pop-country, with fingerpicked guitar and male-female duet vocals slathered in Townsend's usual oceans of reverb. Other tracks are entirely instrumental, sometimes recalling Tangerine Dream movie soundtracks. This is a left turn even by Townsend's somewhat wacky standards, and may be his most emotionally resonant album to date. ~ Phil Freeman
Professional Reviews
Kerrang (Magazine) (p.51) - "[I]t drifts through a languid soundworld of delicate song craft, acoustic guitar picking and New Age ambience."
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Reviews
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It is incredible that both Deconstruction and Ghost album were created by the same artist. They are so vastly different it is truly amazing. Deconstruction is easily the heaviest album of the four Devin Townsend Project discs into which Devin channeled the most ridiculous levels of his psyche, complete with jagged and abrasive sections culminating in off-the-wall passages, aggressive vocal parts, and mostly humour-driven lyrical content.
Ghost, on the other hand, is marked with a droning, meditative atmosphere throughout. The songs are defined by lofty passages filled with finger-picked acoustic guitars, a lot of flute sounds, and subtle landscapes of sound layered on top of each another. The melodies are strong, but they are infused into the winding, labyrinth-like song structures. As a result, the hooks don't hold for a while yet it is still a fascinating experience listening to the whole disc. About five plays in, I was totally blown away by the album, especially when I realized how all the songs, despite not having much structure, come to a theme and stick with it for a few phrases and build on it before moving onto the next one.
The melodies are among Devin Townsend's finest, perhaps since Terria. Listening to "Feather" has been one of my most rewarding musical experiences ever. Townsend employs an elevation technique when a melody starts on the low and then keeps climbing throughout the song. This way, the 11-minute piece keeps you alert, excited, and even close to tears -- the very quiet and soothing middle section with hummed female vocals and sparse keyboard tinklings becomes all the more emotive as the melody is built to its full potential and allowed to take over.
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