Tobias created it. The lead singer. He is Ghost. His band is a touring band. He has other musicians in studio

Speaking as a guitarist, I find Ghost much more complex to play than they seem at first, with many subtle time signature changes, key changes. 'Cirice' is iconic - it means a lot to the fans, because one of the underlying meanings. As for those meanings - Ghost songs have different layers, the lyrical content is always interesting. I think you got it! The obvious one here is, 'join my cult, and you will no longer feel alone'. A song of manipulation. Also, a refutation of Original Sin _("I know your soul is not tainted, even though you've been told so"._ The other meaning, the ones that the fans choose to see, is 'you are not alone, I feel your pain' - _"I can feel the thunder that's breaking in your heart, I can see through the scars inside you"._ There has only ever been one vocalist, Tobias Forge, who was outed in 2016 or 2017, I think. Papa Emeritus I, II then III. Then Cardinal Copia, who was promoted to IV. He writes pretty much everything - music, lyrics, even the guitar and keyboard solos, which are crafted and composed rather than improvised. He plays guitar on earlier albums. He does however have some collaborators in songwriting, no longer any in the band. You should check out the latest *Impera* album, which has a very clear '80s influence, but produced beautifully, as if it belongs to the modern age, which of course it does. The songs are stellar, only one of them had me confused for a while, but it won rock album of the year 2022 at the American Music Awards.

@MetalxLicaxPP

9 ай бұрын

On the instrumentation part, as a bass player, most of their songs are simplistic from that end. It's a nice dynamic to go with the more complex layering that the other instruments bring.

@TheErazar

8 ай бұрын

Yep, wanted to learn a Ghost song thinking it would take me a few minutes. Nope

You know it’s funny, as someone who absolutely listens to loads of heavy death metal, mathcore, etc, I adore Ghost. Fundamentally, I’ve always seen them as a pop band. Their song structures are tight, verse chorus verse (occasional bridges too) affairs with insatiably catchy hooks, great performances and production, and their visual flair is just something else. I’ve seen them in concert twice and they’re a real spectacle, it’s where you can see the huge influence of stadium rock and AOR, as I think it’s evident that Ghost are as inspired by Queen and their penchant for theatrics as they are Black Sabbath or Iron Maiden. In that respect it’s the best of both worlds, a pop band who excel at being a great pop band who really know how to construct a compelling set of songs, and a metal band with creepy aesthetics and tones that still brings the heaviness. They get gatekept a lot because a lot of metalheads deride them as a pop act, but it’s their embrace of both that makes them so compelling. And Tobias Forge just seems like a fun dude. Closed out both shows I attended by telling the whole audience they should go home and have an orgasm, lmao

This album is their magnum opus. Songs like He Is are more of the same in terms of atmosphere and are just as good compositionally, but From the Pinnacle to the Pit and/or Spirit absolutely deserve a mention for amazing use of contrast in blending heavier grooves with grandiose atmoshpheres, which is what they do best on this album.

Only ever been 1 lead vocalist, Tobias Forge.😄The different Papa Emeritus/Cardinal Copia are only character switches of his, that ties in with the lore of the band. You know an inverse Catholic church with anti-popes

There's an additional bar of 2/4 in the chorus, so it goes like 4/4, 4/4, 2/4 and that additional 2/4 bar ("in your heart") is THE moment in this song for me. It's so smooth that I didn't even notice that it's not all 4/4 at first listen. This was the song that got me into Ghost.

Hello again Bryan...Love them or hate them Ghost certainly knows how to write a spooky and catchy as hell tune... It's 80's power pop rock with a Goth facade which works great...That riff that leads into the choruses is so grimy it needs to be detained for questioning lol Thx Bryan for another great vid ✌️🤘🧐

Yup, there's loads of categories in the Grammys - the music industry's equivalent to the movie industry's Oscars.

The intro sounds like a nod to the band Slayer, especially "South Of Heaven".

@ignoblesavage5559

9 ай бұрын

Yep, almost just an acoustic variation of SOH.

@gnarxy

9 ай бұрын

theres a vid online of james hetfield playing the riff while practicing in the studio. You can tell he wished he came up with it, its pretty heavy on the right gear lol

dang, the music video is awesome...

The vocalist was also in a death metal band called repugnant, but he left it to join ghost.

This song/these lyrics (and maybe even fully half of their catalog) could be a kind of theme song for vampire life.

This one is a small masterpiece for sure! 😍

All of the personas in Ghost regarding the singer, Papa Emeritus I-IV and Cardinal Copia are all Tobias Forge. He often plays, on the albums, guitar, bass and keyboard.

The singer Tobias Forge has been the singer since its inception 15 some odd yrs ago although the lineup did change around a bit at the start of the band

Ghost are undoubtedly the most commercially successful of the occult rock revival bands that began showing up 10-15 years ago. Not my favourite personally. The Devil's Blood were something quite magical while they lasted, taking Iron Maiden's twin guitar sound and infusing it with a lot of 70s prog and acid psychedelia sounding a bit like Iron Maiden and King Crimson playing Doors covers with a lady with a timbre that reminds you of King Diamond handling vocals and litanies to the devil. It rocks, but in a very sultry, seductive, tempting kind of way, which I guess is quite fitting. The Thousandfold Epicentre is an amazing album. Sadly, they're no more, but Year of the Goat are still around and being fairly kickass. Not as adept in the atmosphere department, but they do write incredibly catchy tunes that refuse to be forgotten. Both are highly recommended to anyone wanting a bit of a rabbit hole

@progperljungman8218

9 ай бұрын

Pretty spot on my friend!

@greggerypeccary

9 ай бұрын

What a detailed description of The Devil's Blood... this one actually felt like a Disneyfied version of occult rock (like Cradle of Filth Disneyfied BM)...

@thegrimner

9 ай бұрын

@@greggerypeccary I like my colourful musical descriptions

Physics nerd here^^ The distance between two-wave tops is simply referred to as "wavelength". "Phase" is how off-set two or more waves are from each other. For instance, two wave-tops with a phase of 0 degrees perfectly align with each other. One with 180 degrees means that the waves may perfectly cancel each other. (Good luck finding such mathematical waves in the real world though) Edit: Typo

@CriticalReactions

9 ай бұрын

"The distance is ... length" -- I'm feeling dumb for forgetting such a practical term 😅 Thanks for clearing that up though. I may have passed college physics II (light, thermodynamics, and electrical circuits) but it was only with a C and I'm pretty sure my labs carried a lot of that. I was always a pure math person. It's like little puzzles. Gimme some 3D calculus or something and I'll love it -- just don't ask me to apply that math to a real situation :)

@Henriktranoy

9 ай бұрын

@@CriticalReactions Haha, I feel you mate! Not only is it abstract, but there are a lot of words and definitions to keep track of. Still! Sounds like you retained enough to be able to make it help your intuition and thinking! Even if you couldn't perfectly articulate it, you made yourself understood! In the end that's what's matter IMO, so don't feel stupid for not recalling some silly word^^

Ghost knows how to write some absolute bangers, and the theatrics around it are always really fun. It's probably because they started out in that hard rock/metal scene that they catch flak from the (unfortunately notoriously musically narrow-minded) metal crowd.

I've heard a lot from Ghost without having gone through their discography yet. I've heard this one a few times and it's very enjoyable. Ghost are one of those bands that make a good case that Black Sabbath had it right all along when it comes to how to write metal: slow it down, keep it dark/menacing, make it groove, and write consistently catchy guitar riffs and vocal melodies. It's very iterative, but they're doing it about as well as anyone out there these days, and their mainstream popularity is a testament to how that formula can still sell when done well. FWIW, I'm not saying they're just a Black Sabbath clone; a lot of the 80's doom metal bands were even more purely inspired by Sabbath, but they're clearly a huge component of their sound/influence.

Ghost has many top 5 rock radio hits including a couple number ones. Source : Wiki Ghost discography.

isnt it funny that your computer did that right after the song about satanist possession? happy halloween

And...B-- sometimes computers are doing what SOMEONE ELSE tells them.

@progperljungman8218

9 ай бұрын

E.g. Poltergeists 😱

@ignoblesavage5559

9 ай бұрын

@@progperljungman8218 yup. and hackerturds.

@CriticalReactions

9 ай бұрын

Luckily I'm pretty sure it's not a hacker/malware -- I wipe this computer every 6 months or so and am super cautious about installing random stuff from the internet. But I guess I can't rule out poltergeists 😄

All "papas" (kinda satanic "popes") singing on stage were the same guy - the creative force Tobias Forge, who also played guitar and more on the studio recordings. It lasted a decade or so before his identity was revealed and they were free to make up whatever they wanted and keep the mystery around the band. With his identity known, Forge enjoys other freedoms... 😊 I'd def say their debute is the most retro hard rock/metal - where they were considered to bear clear influences from e.g. Blue Öyster Cult and Meryful Fate. Later on they became more diverse - more pop, more metal, more prog, more... everything... But they've always had the catchy stuff in most songs (and very devided opinions among music fans - you can rarely tell if someone likes Ghost just from their regular tastes 😊)

@CriticalReactions

9 ай бұрын

That clears up the singer then. I might be getting them mixed up with another band then because I didn't associate this type of singing with Ghost at all. It's neat to hear that they have such diversity within their catalog.

@thegrimner

9 ай бұрын

Oops, commented as a reply by accident disregard. Either way, the TLDR is, anyone who likes Ghost will likely really get a kick out of The Devil's Blood and Year of the Goat.

@progperljungman8218

9 ай бұрын

@@thegrimner @thegrimner Yeah, at least if they are in for the occult stuff. Those bands are (even) more retro psych stuff than Ghost I think - not really having the same pop sensibilities (for better or for worse...) Year of the Goat probably comes the closest.(?)

@thegrimner

9 ай бұрын

@@progperljungman8218 yeah, Ghost and The Devil's Blood are contemporaries, but Ghost went openly for a more accessible approach. Selim was very uncompromising. But an amazing composer. Year of the Goat remind me of Muse on occasion, funnily enough. Listen to their song The Emma, you won't be able to unhear it.

@Ca11mero

9 ай бұрын

At least withing metal circles here in Sweden it was kinda known but not verified that Tobias Forge was the front man. I remember reading about him a few months after Opus Eponymous released. What made it a bit more confusing was the "papas" during live shows, since it's harder to hear if it's the actually the same guy or not.

do you listen to the music on your headphones quiet or loud?

@CriticalReactions

9 ай бұрын

Somewhere in the middle. I try to reach a volume that allows for clarity and impact without hitting a level that could damage my ears.

hello bryan I know is in your list but when can we see the album review for tesseract? cheers!!

@CriticalReactions

9 ай бұрын

I select albums on a week to week basis so I don't know when it'll happen.

The solo sounds a lot like Jimmy Page, I hear Sabbath and Metallica influences and some goth perhaps. A great tune. I don't think that the vocals are pop, rather it makes the song more eerie. Harsh vocals, or even growl, would just be predictable and wouldn't make the song justice imho.

There's been a whole wave of influential Swedish rock and metal bands that deserve more recognition. Evergrey, in particular should be 100 times more popular than Ghost.

The videoclip for this song is kind of an homage/ripoff of Carrie's famous ball scene, which of course fits so well into the atmosphere and lyrics, as well as their anti-Christian/satanic "schtick" (like you so aptly mentioned, "dangerous yet inviting" lol)

i just dont understand how this generic band is award winning when theres so many much more talented bands. the music is very generic and mediocre.