Album review: I Am Ghost - Those We Leave Behind

Oh boy. Someone should probably tell I Am Ghost that there’s already one A.F.I., and even though they’re nowhere near as good as they used to be, you need to pull out a stronger album than Those We Leave Behind if you want to appeal to anyone other than stripy-tighted teenage girls who overdo the eye make-up and got really upset by the family cat passing away when it got hit by a taxi.

Good grief… I mean, at least bands like Cradle Of Filth have the guts and courage of their convictions enough to make themselves something other than pleadingly accessible and insipid lowest-common-denominator angst pop. Those We Leave Behind is a boy-band album, regardless of the instrumentation and marketing. I Am Ghost are utterly insincere, utterly devoid of edge and atmosphere, recycling the choruses and vocal hooks of better bands and delivering them with such a lack of passion that you have to wonder how low their per diems really are.

And just look at these song titles - it’s like the guest-list for a cliché convention. “Buried Way Too Shallow”; “Don’t Wake Up”; “Bone Garden”; “They Always Come Back”… and the lyrics are exactly what you’d expect, a mismatched mash-up of sickly romance, puff-chested braggadocio and horror movie imagery. I Am Ghost are to rock music what Laurell K Hamilton is to literature, and no amount of fast guitar riffs and screeched vocals balanced against the pitch-corrected harmonies can disguise it. If “Saddest Story Never Told” doesn’t make you want to vomit and smash your stereo at the same time, you have no concept of music’s potential as an artform. So allow me to start your education: Those We Leave Behind is the nadir, a trough, a staggering low-point, such a naked and grasping appeal to teenage misery that I lack the words to express how furious it makes me.

Commercial rock has never been a pretty market - hell, it was rotten before I knew how to switch on a radio for myself - but the download revolution and the subsequent nervous flinch of the record companies has turned it into a race for the bottom, with artistically bankrupt bands like I Am Ghost willing to whore themselves out for a dream of rock-star success, and with labels more than willing to pimp them until the wolves finally claw their way through the door with the receivership documents.

From Sony BMG (or whatever they’re called this week), it would be par for the course, but this isn’t a major label record. I’ve said it here before, but I’ll say it again - it’s truly saddening to see how far Epitaph have fallen. Once the absolute pinnacle of punk/alternative credibility, all they seem to be able to squeeze out of the corporate sound-factory now are identikit outfits like I Am Ghost, peddling music predicated entirely on image and utterly devoid of depth and honesty. Those We Leave Behind is what Disney would use as the soundtrack for a CGI set-in-a-high-school remake of Beetlejuice - and if the notion of that theoretical film is enough to make you cringe, steer a clear path away from this album. There’s enough shit to get angry about in the world already.

Related articles:

• Single review: Story Of the Year - Wake Up (0)
• Single review: I Am Ghost - Bone Garden (0)
• Single review: Funeral For A Friend - Waterfront Dance Club / Beneath The Burning Tree (0)