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I was in a store yesterday and I bought the 'Meliora' album that came out last year. I've been listening to it in my car and it's... ok. I was sort of hoping for more but more just doesn't show up. Maybe I just need to give it more spins. I can't believe it's winning awards and things.

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I have been aware of them since their first. Just like everyone else, I was under the impression that blending Blue Oyster Cult and Mercyful Fate felt great and the cover design was decent enough to make me wanna buy the CD... yet I never did.

Some friends of mine were immediately sold on them, especially those who are older than me. That is because they are less fascinated with the past than I am.

I somehow ignored the subsequent output by Ghost up until Classic Rock included "SQUARE HAMMER" in the CD companion of one of its issues. That song is wonderful! Poppish and very BOC like, I just love it. I'm glad to have it in a compilation. I tried other tunes on the Internet, but none caught my attention like this one, so I still haven't bought any of their albums. I think I might check them live the next time they visit Italy. I should say the next time HE visits Italy, cuz apparently all Ghouls have been dismissed by Emeritus.

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11 minutes ago, Skull_Kollektor said:

I have been aware of them since their first. Just like everyone else, I was under the impression that blending Blue Oyster Cult and Mercyful Fate felt great and the cover design was decent enough to make me wanna buy the CD... yet I never did.

Some friends of mine were immediately sold on them, especially those who are older than me. That is because they are less fascinated with the past than I am.

I somehow ignored the subsequent output by Ghost up until Classic Rock included "SQUARE HAMMER" in the CD companion of one of its issues. That song is wonderful! Poppish and very BOC like, I just love it. I'm glad to have it in a compilation. I tried other tunes on the Internet, but none caught my attention like this one, so I still haven't bought any of their albums. I think I might check them live the next time they visit Italy. I should say the next time HE visits Italy, cuz apparently all Ghouls have been dismissed by Emeritus.

'Square Hammer' and 'Cirice' are the reasons why I purchased 'Meliora'. Those two tracks are amazing ('Square Hammer' is on a bonus disk for some reason and not the main album which is annoying). They seem to have great songs hidden away in a lot of filler. It makes buying an album really hard. 

They do have some great songs though. Check out these two modern classics: 

 

 

 

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Cirice sure sounds good to my ears, but not as fresh as "Square Hammer". It reminds me of some Metallica tunes, especially some of the plodding tracks of "Hardwired...". Funny because this Cirice came out before :D

I like better "Year Zero". 

I clearly remember that some weeks ago I binge listened to Ghost on youtube only to find myself ultimately spinning Blue Oyster Cult's "Fire of Unknown Origin". What an excellent album that is!

Emeritus really picks up on BOC's Buck Dharma sung tracks! Like "Don't Fear the Reaper", "Nosferatu", "Burning for You", "Then Came the Last Days of May" and the black side of "Tyranny and Mutation"! He totally emulates his way of multilayered whispering. The manic attention to vocals naturally also brings King Diamond to mind.

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  • 4 weeks later...
I have been aware of them since their first. Just like everyone else, I was under the impression that blending Blue Oyster Cult and Mercyful Fate felt great and the cover design was decent enough to make me wanna buy the CD... yet I never did.

Some friends of mine were immediately sold on them, especially those who are older than me. That is because they are less fascinated with the past than I am.

I somehow ignored the subsequent output by Ghost up until Classic Rock included "SQUARE HAMMER" in the CD companion of one of its issues. That song is wonderful! Poppish and very BOC like, I just love it. I'm glad to have it in a compilation. I tried other tunes on the Internet, but none caught my attention like this one, so I still haven't bought any of their albums. I think I might check them live the next time they visit Italy. I should say the next time HE visits Italy, cuz apparently all Ghouls have been dismissed by Emeritus.

 

I don't get the Mercyful Fate comparisons at all, and neither does King Diamond himself. As King said, "where are the riffs? where are the solos?" It's just satanic pop rock, or even more appropriately, this:

 

afd14d7e2597b184044b30b733d41b2a.jpg

 

Sent from my HTC6535LVW using Tapatalk

 

 

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They are good rock albums that I quite like (Opus Eponymous and Meliora specifically) but I don't delude myself into thinking that it even closely resembles anything that King or MF have done in the past 3-4 decades. 

On 6/3/2017 at 4:37 PM, Skull_Kollektor said:

I clearly remember that some weeks ago I binge listened to Ghost on youtube only to find myself ultimately spinning Blue Oyster Cult's "Fire of Unknown Origin". What an excellent album that is!

That album is quite underrated, honestly. 

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I've given 'Meliora' quite a few spins by now and it actually gets a lot better as you go. In the right context it's actually a lot of fun. The thing is, there's so much better music out there that is more deserving of my/our time.

There's just something funny about it that just blocks me from loving it. I think my temporary interest is done, put it that way. 

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  • 1 year later...

(I'm just going to necro this thread, nevermind me....)

So, I've just discovered these guys a couple of days ago, and I've listened to all four of their full-lengths. Overall, I'm impressed with this band, at least at a time when anything that claims to be called "hard rock" or just about any similar genre is a sterilized, digitized, over-compressed joke. At least I can hear real instruments, and I can hear them all individually. 

Their first album is pretty forgettable, in my opinion. I listened to it once, and really just skipped most of the songs halfway through because I was so bored with them (although "Genesis" is kind of cool, it can't save the album).

I listened to Infestissumam next, and I found this quite a bit better. It's got more of an original sound, the arrangements are interesting, and some of the songs are catchy. I think this album begins brilliantly, the intro and its seamless transition into the second song and then the third and fourth songs are good too. But it kind of suffers from being front-loaded, in my opinion. About halfway through the album, everything just began to sound the same for the most part, and some of the songs were way too long and dragged out. 

So then I tried Meliora because I was convinced this band had to get better - given the fact that "Rats" from Prequelle was the first song I heard from them and it was light years better than anything on the first two albums. Anyway, I feel like Meliora is where they kind of made the transition into more of a metal band, though I'm still not really sure if I would call them that. There are some really good songs on this album, but also some not very good ones, in the same way the former two albums bored me at times. There are some really brilliant ideas expressed here; "From the Pinnacle to the Pit", "Cirice", "He Is", and "Majesty" are just really cool songs. Different, but that's more often a good thing, I believe.

And then I heard Prequelle, and I was...not quite blown away, but I still think this is a great album. "Rats", "Faith", "See the Light"; these songs are so good one right after the other. I love "Miasma", it's definitely one of the best instrumental pieces I've heard in a few years. Really creative, really clever stuff. This album almost kind of sounds like a weird power metal-esque version of The Sound of Perseverance in a way. I'm not sure why. I find it really enjoyable, though. I love the guitar tone especially. By far their best album to date.

Overall, this is honestly the best new(er) band I've heard. They're not really rehashing anything, but there's a lot of influences there I can see - Mercyful Fate to an extent, Dream Theater, Alice Cooper, Rainbow or Dio maybe, and some shit like Blind Guardian or something. I love the Luciferian themes and the seriousness with which they're often expressed; that alone and their aesthetic are the main reasons I believe for the parallel between them and Mercyful Fate, but I also find them to be very different (Ghost is definitely not a Mercyful Fate tribute band in any way, nor do they remotely sound like black metal haha). 

I think they're a cool band, definitely fun. I've read from several people who think the masks and theatrics and shit during their live shows is lame, but I think it's an interesting concept. The obscurity, yes, but also in a time when rock music is nearly dead, people want attention drawn solely to themselves and want recognition for the smallest, most insignificant things, and the visual seems like people's #1 priority in this day and age so they can upload all their dumb photos to Instacrap or whatever, hiding one's true identity on stage is kind of a ballsy move, if for no other reason than the music is given free reign to speak for itself.

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