MGF Reviews The Ghost Inside – Fury and the Fallen Ones

Reviews, Top Story


The Ghost Inside – Fury and the Fallen Ones
Mediaskare Records (4/15/08)
Metal / Hardcore

The Ghost Inside is another one of those bands not necessarily doing anything new or inventive. On Fury and the Fallen Ones, its debut album, the band offers up this juggernaut of metal with a hardcore soul. There are the breakdowns and growled vocals, but everything else is expansive enough (more rhythm guitar and melody and so on) to make it more than hardcore.

And while it’s nothing new, The Ghost Inside presents the set in such a powerful package, where every song just seems to have this edge and rawness, that you just can’t help but nod along to every song.

Take the killer melody haunting the background during “Faith or Forgiveness”, and this really good riff that propels “Disintegrator” forward, like a train ready to derail before a groove-laden bridge rights the proceedings. The bass and drumming gives “Siren Song” a sense of dread, and the band does a good job of mixing up the repetitive chunks with moments of urgency. And speaking of urgency, “Shiner” opens up with the entire package tumbling over itself (like you were running for your life from a pack of rabid wolves) before everything slows down for the melodic mid-song bridges and chorus elements. Then there’s “Smoke and Signal Fires”, an ethereal instrumental that acts as a nice palate cleanser before the band tears through the album’s final two tracks—the choking “The Lion War” and almost-epic “Blue and Gold” (How epic can you get in a little over three minutes?).

The only weakness would be that some of the trackss start to blend together, but that’s a combination of the singing style and genre in general which you can’t necessarily hold against the band. If anything, they do a hell of a job varying things up with the melody from the guitar.

The only real problem with this album is that it’s too short—you’re left waiting to see what else the band could come up with. But maybe that’s a good thing. This is a fantastic debut for a band entering a somewhat turgid genre, so to cause the listener to sit up and take notice is an impressive feat indeed.

Rating:

Jonathan Widro is the owner and founder of Inside Pulse. Over a decade ago he burst onto the scene with a pro-WCW reporting style that earned him the nickname WCWidro. Check him out on Twitter for mostly inane non sequiturs