Ritual – Ghost

The OTT nature of these guys image is bringing a bit of the theatre back into rock and metal. Not as filthy and dick obsessed as Rammstein nor as commercial as Kiss. Ghost populate a sweet spot somewhere between ironic hipster love of genre and a real metal faithful following.

Their formula on paper draws similarities to BabyMetal. What they lack in cute pigtailed cartoon front women they gain in smoothed 70’s soft rock melodies. Where as their image is more High Church cosplaying at Cinco da Mayo, confoundingly they play down the (reasonable to expect) thrash in their music. So they come across like one of those mid 70’s rock bands with the elaborately painted album sleeves and a keyboard player who wears a cape until you see what they look like. Then you expect Freddie from Scooby-Doo to unmask them before the final encore.

Ritual comes from their debut full album Opus Eponymous. You can see the games they’re playing on the horror comic book sleeve and in that title. This is Universal Monster Rock.

It’s a good thing to have bands back on the metal scene who understand the cartoonish fun of it all, without always going for the Rob Zombie buckets of blood R-Rated approach. It’s also good to see from their subsequent releases that Ghost appreciate the value of a consistently ‘easy to copy with a biro’ logo.

I imagine a fair few desks and text books have been desecrated with it by now.