Written: 2nd March 2024
With self-confessed influences ranging from Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Suicidal Tendencies, Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode, Gost (brainchild of James Lollar) treads an increasingly unique path in music. Combining threateningly sinister synthwave and EDM with menacing metallic and industrial elements, Gost also draws on a love of horror soundtrack composers to illustrate his Stygian tales.
For an artist who is so inspired by the more extreme components of electronica and dance music, Gost has built more of a home in metal such as being invited to tour with black metal icons Mayhem. “On the Mayhem tour, I ended up one night in a hotel bar talking to (Mayhem bassist) Necrobutcher. I was thanking them for having me on the tour, and he's like, ‘That was me, I wanted you on this tour.’ That's fucking bizarre. But it's cool, man,” says James. “It's weird to be accepted by the metal community, it's humbling, it's honourable. It's where I come from.”
Opening with the slow, vespertine prologue Judgement, Gost begins to draw the listeners obdurately closer, ensnaring us just in time for the explosion and distressed screams that lead into the title track, Prophecy. Mixing industrial sounds with heavy techno, Prophecy opens the door to Gost’s nightmarish world of demonic pulses and snarling distortion. A track with parts that are reminiscent of the music of the chase scenes in The Terminator and others that almost allow some cleaner melody to come through, the title track pounds and sneers with inhuman malevolence. James Lollar explains the concept behind the album, “It's about an imaginative fall of the Western civilization, the biblical end of the world – the rise of Satan and Armageddon. In America, there's been a big rise of scared, reactive Christianity again, almost like a re-emergence of the Satanic Panic. So, it felt like an appropriate time to bring Satan back into things.”
During the first twenty seconds of Death In Bloom, distant yet eerie synth moves forward into our consciousness, until insanity is unleashed. There is a disturbing clinical precision to the agitated blasts and hammer-like percussion. Howling screams and unnatural speech haunt the track until a staccato and jagged synth led section begins like a patrolling predator on the hunt. As an album, Prophecy does not stand still with one idea for long and Deceiver allows a small amount of light to pierce the oppressive and sable atmosphere. With exhilarating bass tones and a continuous driving rhythm, the track crackles with dance like energy. However, James laughs, “If people listened to my music at a rave they would have a bad fucking trip. But it’s a fun challenge to try to make metal with digital noises. I love processing on a computer and electronic equipment and trying to make it sound raw. It's a unique challenge, because everything in there is clean, and you’re using plug in distortion and things like that. It's just a whole different realm than using pedals and amps and shit.”
Obituary initially strikes with volatile and sizzling industrial and techno accents, only to be followed by 1990s style rave influenced keyboards and a melodic but rapid ending. Temples of Tears builds steadily towards a more mid-paced approach throughout the bulk of the track. An inherent evil stalks the streets until finding its victim and there is a change of mood towards that of grim anxiety. Whenever the listener is in danger of feeling anything even close to normality or comfort, Gost rips the thought from our minds. While each track rises and falls with intensity, there is a strange cohesion to the album, which may come from the way the album was produced. Recorded alone in Texas at the end of 2022, James found a reach vein of creativity. “I can’t put a song down once I start it. I’m too OCD; I have to finish it.”
Decadent Delay, one of the most varied tracks on the album, has harrowing and slicing black metal type riffs and screams sit alongside 1980s style keyboards, interjections reminiscent of acid house music and a savagely barbaric conclusion. Widow Song starts with spectral and detached choral style voices before a phantasmagorical voice begins a visceral narrative of deep mourning, a struggle for faith, personal sacrifice and a sense of apocalyptic loss. I hear you calling / I see you falling out of time / Buried under time / Your presence haunting / The pain you feel will never end / A lover lost in time. Gothically symphonic and hovering somewhere between Depeche Mode, Type O Negative, Marilyn Mason and Vast, Widow Song is the one track on the album that sounds, for the most part at least, like an actual song. It is a welcome addition that adds some excellent variety to the overall tone. The rapid, rave-tinged Golgotha and Shelter sit either side of the machine-gun beats of the chillingly devastating Digital Death, which annihilates everything in its path.
Through The Water begins with a forceful beat and a distorted and disembodied vocal. In the latter part of the song, black metal influences return and crunching, colossal riffs drive like a juggernaut out of the speakers. Closing track, Leviathan is appropriately named, first attacking with brutality, then retreating to the depths before returning to hunt with urgent melodic beats and breakdowns.
For James, Prophecy is an album that he needed to make. “When Valediction came out, COVID hit, and I guess people weren’t so into art while the world was on its knees,” he says. “I wanted to reconnect with some of my older fans who maybe didn’t feel that album so much. I wanted to go back in time and bring some of the older shit back, some of the older sounds.” Prophecy is the combination of James’s single-minded vision and the impossible bastard child of a diverse range of artists: Trent Reznor, the Pet Shop Boys on speed, Jean Michel Jarre belligerently turning up the intensity of his Electronica albums, John Carpenter, Ulver, Ministry, Architects and the threatening symphonic keyboards of Emperor. Prophecy will not appeal to every fan of metal or every fan of electronica. However, for those who are willing to embrace the unique combinations that Gost creates, it is an exciting, dangerously unpredictable and addictive album. See you in hell….
Prophecy is released on 8th March 2024