Ghost Brigade - Isolation Songs

I really don’t know why but listening to “Isolation Songs” left me with a sense of loss. As if something just vanished into thin air. Something that has always been but is not anymore. As if something has been taken by this album. I start thinking that by giving it another chance I could understand where all this came from, I could track down the root of this feeling. I turn out the lights and I push “Play” button for the second time. Melodies are charging through the speakers filling the room with images. Scattered pieces of the past struggling to make you aware of their presence, each claiming its place to an eternal puzzle. This is indeed a very strange album. Minutes are passing, or that’s what I thing and trough the haunting compositions familiar “Paradise Lost” atmospheres and long lost “Amorphis” memories are proudly parading. The guitars sometimes sharp like the reaper’s sickle and other times gloomy and heavy like the last view of an endless cemetery under a clouded sky on a cold autumn morning. All begin to make sense somehow. They are all linked. Manne Ikonen’s voice sounds also controversial. Sometimes he sounds like sinking into despair, imploring oblivion, overflowing emotion in a tortured Swan-song while few minutes later he breaks out in desperate cries in a final attempt to get rid of an unbearable burden. The CD keeps playing and after “22:22-Nihil” the walls move in a little closer and I feel like suffocating. Is like you are in a familiar place surrounded by persons you cherish and love, they are all having a good time (or pretending to) and still you feel like all of a sudden you are the only inhabitant of the loneliest place in the world.
\r\nThe album is no longer sounding, still the haunting silhouette on the cover keeps staring at me as if is trying to tell me something. Like a little boy bragging silently about a mischief or something he stole.
\r\nThe sense of loss is no more. It’s place is taken over by her “little sister”, her eternal follower, solitude. I think the title “Isolation Songs” is more than enough to describe Ghost Brigade’s music. Getting my thoughts together I conclude that you have to experience this album in order to understand it. Not just listen to it. You have to accept it as it is, along with your own ghosts for they will keep you company while listening to it...
\r\nI pour another drink and push the “repeat” button. “Isolation Songs”…what a matching title! After all, we are all alone..aren’t we?
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\r\nDimitris Karantounias\r\n