“Beyond the Door“
from the album The Strangest Colored Lights
2008
iTunes
The Strangest Colored Lights is the fourth full-length release from Birmingham, Alabama’s 13ghosts. Since originally forming under another name in 1989, the band — focused around songwriters and vocalists Brad Armstrong and Buzz Russell — has endured or incurred break-ups and breakdowns, additions, subtractions, and infringement infractions, useless degrees and youthful distractions, guest performances, drug dependencies, and death. Though all of these things undoubtedly influence the band, it’s the degrees and death that shape the songs (Armstrong holds an MFA in poetry; 13ghosts reformed after founding member Thomas Rhodes committed suicide in 1998).
A regular roster of band members plays a part as well. While the previous album, 2004’s Cicada, employed the talents of a score of supporting musicians, including Birmingham area notables John Strohm, Taylor Hollingsworth, and Maria Taylor, The Strangest Colored Lights pares down the line-up to its now current, consistent core of Armstrong (piano, guitar and vocals), Russell (guitar and vocals), Sammy Boggan (bass guitar), Jason Lucia (drums and other percussion), and Andrew Vernon (effects, loops and other sounds). As a result, this record is more thematically cohesive, and stylistically comprehensive, than its predecessor.
“Lonely Death of Space Avenger” has the depth, distance and dimension implied in its title. Ethereal, echoing, effects-laden vocals by Brad Armstrong are set against a spacey strumming that adds to the sense of alienation the track describes, and foreshadows 13ghosts’s persistent preoccupation with the proximity of death and the puzzle of life after it.
“Soft Houses” is a somber composition with a heartbeat rhythm. It stirs memories and ghosts and guilt, but does so with heartfelt harmonies, plaintive picking, and soft, sustained strumming. “Beyond the Door” has a sweeping expansiveness reminiscent of The Church. The ringing, swirling guitars bring to mind Will Sargeant, or perhaps Johnny Marr. Buzz Russell sings insights on the afterlife:
Here is a key as a gift to the door
And if you believe after death there is more
The horror and fear disappear
Were you really frightened?
Nobody’s here there’s just you
And the corner of a dream
The band may be haunted by the past and by things which are lost, buried, or hidden, but the creativity recorded on The Strangest Colored Lights assures that 13ghosts will not languish unheard and unseen. It’s more than a whisper. It is alive.