(Here’s DGR‘s review of a new EP by Creepsylvanian splatterthrashers Ghoul, out now on the Tankcrimes label.)
If you’ve been trawling around the underground long enough, you’ve likely crossed paths with the crazed crossover thrash and death metal hybrid that is Ghoul; they’re a name that probably needs little introduction at this point – having battled out a career for years that is combination tongue-in-cheek shock horror, community theater, public-access TV, pirate radio, and puppet show.
The band, in all their murderous muppety glory, seem to appear out of the ether at shows and crank out crazed sets before vanishing into the night. You’d never know that they’ve been subsisting on a series of splits and singles since 2016’s Dungeon Bastards and prior to that had been on a slightly more sollid rotating albums/eps collection every three or four years.
The upshot of this is that Ghoul have five full-lengths to their name already, but their most recent EP Noxious Concoctions is the most substantial collection of material – four originals songs, one cover, for a grand total of eighteen and a half minutes of music – that the masked madmen have cranked out in almost eight years.
Photo by J Donovan Malley
The word salad that describes Ghoul hasn’t changed much on Noxious Concoctions; Ghoul have found a groove that few bands are plumbing succesfully these days and it is one strong enough that were you not aware of the band’s theatrics for a live show, you’d still easily assume they have a very strong taste for solid pit starters.
Much like you can buy starters specialized to get the charcoal in your barbeque going, so too can you view Ghoul and pits. Light Ghoul on fire, toss in center of room, and watch circle-pit form. Strangely enough, you might be surprised how well that hypothetical might work with the band to begin with.
You don’t really take a sound designed to be easily understood live and mutate it too much. Even when expanded out to seven-plus minutes the way Noxious‘ opener is, it’s done so the band can add more to their overall musical universe and then keep every song afterward just barely pushing three minutes – the Funerot cover that closes out the affair doesn’t even both clearing a minute-and-a-half. Ghoul bookend Noxious Concoctions with their longest and shortest songs.
Noxious Concoctions has a lot of fun with its contasts, opening with “The Eyes Of The Witch” and jamming almost eight minutes worth of music with enough meat that it could’ve been released entirely on its own. Part stage play with multiple characters gleefully tackling the vocal front and part full assault, Ghoul leave surprisingly little on the table by the time the song wraps, calling in reinforcements for guest vocals and ending on a hilariously indulgent amount of guitar work.
There’s a gleeful amount of ‘just when you thought it was finished!’ in those closing moments that you almost start to forget that three minutes earlier in the song you were subject to a multi-pronged vocal attack. If you’ve ever wanted to see a concert crowd laying on the ground like a bunch of wiped-out toddlers then maybe subjecting them to “The Eyes Of The Witch” would be a worthy endeavor.
Elsewhere within Concoctions things are more traditionally ‘dumb’, Ghoul have a ton of fun with the bouncing rhythms of “Shotgun Gulch” and the equally groove-driven “Ratlicker”. Noxious starts ambitious and fast – “Noxious Concoctions” is your go-to thrasher of the EP – slows things to a pit-dancing pace, and then bludgeons the whole mess to a pulp in the sub-one-minute chugging of their Funerot cover.
Stripped down to just the bones, Noxious Concoctions can be viewed as a ‘more Ghoul‘, which in the grand scheme of things is good on its own. Ghoul are a band that needs to be around heavy metal, even just existing on the fringes as this crazed project that when described shouldn’t work.
There’s a sense that if one thing goes slightly wrong in the operation then the whole thing falls apart, but there’s a gleeful abandon in that. Ghoul exist by sheer force of will, a combination of music that revels in how ridiculous it is but is also stunningly competent on its own. Ghoul can absolutely thrash out a song and drop into a wall of punk-riffs at the drop of a dime; they mostly choose to do so while dressed up like the lead and background murderers in a horror film. It’s a combination of joking self-sabotage and glorious spectacle.
You could judge Ghoul releases by how accurately they manage to capture the chaotic mechanisms of Ghoul in the flesh as an operation. Noxious Concoctions gets damned close to doing so. It’s about as chaotic and pirate-radio as you would expect the band to be, with the sneaky-enough musical chops to betray the fact that even when Ghoul are making intentionally sloppy punked-out music, they’re still able to spin up a pit like a vortex.
https://tankcrimes.bandcamp.com/album/noxious-concoctions
https://www.facebook.com/GhoulunaticsAsylum