Ghost – Skeletá review

Breaking the metaphor, in Ghost what you see is what you don’t get. Visually the Swedish collective – or if you prefer the solo project of front man Tobias Forge, plus hired hands – seem deeply ensconced in the Black Metal ouevre, from corpse paint to inverted crosses to necromancer-friendly cover art. As part of this dark multiverse since their inception Forge has adopted the persona of several iconoclastic figureheads, the latest of which being Papa V Perpetua. Discovering the genealogy is up to you.

All of that said, as an entity Ghost have evolved into one of the world’s most successful metal bands, their previous outing Impera going top 10 in more than a dozen countries and narrowly missing out topping the US album chart. The erm, killer aspect to all this however is that their music is, if you don’t listen too hard to the lyrics, about as threatening as Mötley Crüe and owes as much of debt to (Whisper it quietly, this is a church) Meatloaf as it does Bathory.

That said, Forge has given Skeletá a more intuitive and human emotional landscape, to the extent that Satanized is he claims about being so in love that the effect resembles possession. If you want to believe you absolutely can do, but even for the less committed the likes of Cenotaph, Lachryma and De Profundis Borealis are all schlocky, fun and hugely rewarding. With the closing stanza of Umbra and Excelsis bearing a more profound message about accepting what we can’t change, Skeletá goes off into the afterlife having exorcised a demon or two – and Ghost’s musical masquerade ball goes from strength to strength.

You can read a full review here.