Dark and haunting electro, but be careful if you feel like dancing to it
The line-up of electro quartet Ghost Capsules includes Tim Simenon, the man behind Bomb The Bass, who met the other two guys in the band while touring Bomb The Bass’s ‘Back To Light’ album in 2010. The project sees Simenon opting for songs, albeit not the verse-chorus-verse variety. These songs are something altogether different. Vocalist Laura Gomez is the narrator, the pulsating beats and delicious melodies soundtracking a storyline in which she is the heroine; in control and in harmony with her dark and haunting surroundings. It’s the vocals that are the main force here, the music unfolding and changing like a backdrop movie to a live band.
It is likely reviewers will harp on about Laura Gomez’s mellifluous and hypnotic voice, about her ghostly, yet strong presence on this album. All true. Cue predictable references to angels, mermaids, fairies and enchantresses, but this siren is actually kicking ass. The track ‘Morgan Le Fay’ is a direct reference to the sorceress of Arthurian folklore, who does the ass kicking in countless plots, from medieval literature through to later fiction and modern-day film.
The ethos of Ghost Capsules is perhaps encapsulated in ‘My Red Shoes’, though they have chosen the compelling ‘Inside’, with its poppier perceptions, as the lead track of their latest EP. Do you know the ‘Red Shoes’ fairy tale, written by Hans Christian Andersen, in which a vain girl tricks her adoptive mother into buying her a pair of much-coveted red shoes? The girl abandons a church visit for a party and, once she starts to dance, the shoes will not allow her to stop. She dances and dances with no end in sight, until she reaches the point of insanity, when a man takes mercy on her and chops off her feet. Delightful! That’s the trouble with red shoes, you see. Laura Gomez warns that, in her red shoes, she’s confident about dedicating herself to artistic passion and the adventures this brings. Hedonism and freedom of expression are her rights.
The metaphorical man with the rusty axe is powerless to act in the world Ghost Capsules have created. Tracks like ‘Magnetic Fields’ (“Stop the hands of the clock”), ‘Time And Place’ and ‘Another Earth’, with its fuzzy, low-strung basslines and shuffling beats – begging for a dancefloor mix – clearly hint at an alternative world, one in which the listener should be on their guard. The question here is not, what do Ghost Capsules sound like? It is, do you dare to find out?
“When I count to three, you will wake up.” (‘Inside’)
