Here’s another late-breaking young-band-on-the-rise alert: TV Ghost. I can say this even though they started in 2006 because each of their albums has sounded a little different. They grew up as musicians in the garage-punk tradition in Indiana, and that is precisely how their first CD sounded: post-punk, disorganized, noisy. Over the next couple of releases, the band began to inhabit their chosen name, which is said to have been taken from the phenomenon of old-school television frequency disturbances. A true TV ghost is in effect a problem, a double-image on the screen that borders on the annoying.
But it turns out that the name of the first television series ever was The Television Ghost, a 1930s series in which the ghosts of murder victims (actually, all of them were played by one actor) described their grisly ends to the viewing audience. Alarming, just like the psych-punk music TV Ghost is making at present. Their current sound ripples with tension and fear and a sense of imminent dread, as if hearing a friendly pop hit like “We Got the Beat” twisted out of focus and afloat suddenly on the same wicked chord changes as Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.”
Scary stuff, this is, that lodges itself in a listener’s cranium like elements of a bad dream. But this is not said to dissuade a ticket buyer. And, it has been done before, the sound of the apocalypse, from Nine Inch Nails to Sonic Youth, only this time in an extravagant noise crush that TV Ghost warps into their own weird music. Underneath this haunted exploration is a band with good bones. Jimmy Frezza, Tim Gick, Brahne Hoeft, Tristan Ivas, and Jackson Van Horn are unyielding musicians on a mission to realize something that is original and singular and make it their own thing. And someday, name recognition would be nice.
Here’s another late-breaking young-band-on-the-rise alert: TV Ghost. I can say this even though they started in 2006 because each of their albums has sounded a little different. They grew up as musicians in the garage-punk tradition in Indiana, and that is precisely how their first CD sounded: post-punk, disorganized, noisy. Over the next couple of releases, the band began to inhabit their chosen name, which is said to have been taken from the phenomenon of old-school television frequency disturbances. A true TV ghost is in effect a problem, a double-image on the screen that borders on the annoying.
But it turns out that the name of the first television series ever was The Television Ghost, a 1930s series in which the ghosts of murder victims (actually, all of them were played by one actor) described their grisly ends to the viewing audience. Alarming, just like the psych-punk music TV Ghost is making at present. Their current sound ripples with tension and fear and a sense of imminent dread, as if hearing a friendly pop hit like “We Got the Beat” twisted out of focus and afloat suddenly on the same wicked chord changes as Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.”
Scary stuff, this is, that lodges itself in a listener’s cranium like elements of a bad dream. But this is not said to dissuade a ticket buyer. And, it has been done before, the sound of the apocalypse, from Nine Inch Nails to Sonic Youth, only this time in an extravagant noise crush that TV Ghost warps into their own weird music. Underneath this haunted exploration is a band with good bones. Jimmy Frezza, Tim Gick, Brahne Hoeft, Tristan Ivas, and Jackson Van Horn are unyielding musicians on a mission to realize something that is original and singular and make it their own thing. And someday, name recognition would be nice.
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