What if Tim Sköld was the industrial music incarnation of Tilda Swinton? An atypical figure with improbable hair, who we're always happy to see appearing all over the place in sometimes unexpected projects, in different roles, but always coming out on top? Here he is alongside Finnegan Bell, the young singer of Love Ghost, a Californian alternative rock project with influences from grunge, post-punk, pop, emo, trap... Their collaboration promises not only to be a meeting of two generations, but also a refreshing freedom of tone, free from the codified rules of genre.
Indeed, from Nightshade & Cocaine onwards, Love Ghost and Skold are enjoying themselves, liberated. Typical of the grunge movement, the almost apathetic lethargic spleen of those whose bodies are still with us but whose souls are already wandering elsewhere haunts the vocals, while the guitar riffs add a welcome industrial heaviness. The voices are complementary, their defeatist harmony working very well. The result is a heady, hazy anthem of romantic self-destructive wanderings. In their music, the two artists have already demonstrated their taste for hybridization on several occasions (remember, for example, how the last album by Not My God, the duo formed by Nero Bellum and Tim Sköld, went in many directions), and it's only logical that their album together should display the same freedom.
The multiple experiences of one find in the freshness of the other an ideal playground. These are no longer times of defined boundaries. Love Ghost and Skold go from almost naïve sweetness to thinly-veiled menace (Great White Buffalo, which could have Red Hot Chili Peppers airs if it didn't suddenly plunge into more negativity), release a pop-rock track that suddenly drifts into dark, hallucinatory synthetic ambiences (You Are The Gun (Valhalla), certain passages of which recall some nightmares of Marilyn Manson's Mechanical Animals period). First listeners may be sceptical: at first, it all sounds too sweet. But the charm of the slightly forced emo-goth punchlines (“I don't wanna die if there's no pain” in Nightshade & Cocaine or “I don't want to die but I want to be buried” in Cemetery and its chilling intro melody, somewhere between trap and witch-house) eventually takes hold, thanks to the sincerity of Bell's visceral, authentic and skinned singing. As the album progresses, the sensitivity that emerges, the multiple influences, the vulnerable side that doesn't give a damn about anything, all become seductive.
One bittersweet lament follows another. The tracks are short and effective (Payback and its phrasing à la Archive's Fuck U, then Level Up and the aggressiveness of its rhythm - very “Mansonian” - are potential hits). In its refusal to restrict itself musically and in its general mood between resignation, nihilism, disillusionment and melancholy, the meeting between Love Ghost and Skold resurrects the fragrance of dark 90s alternative rock. It's reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails, Placebo and Alice in Chains, without really sounding like any of them, but infuses them with a contemporary energy. In its awkwardness, like all the work of a young, fiery artist, the album eventually finds a certain grace that makes it endearing and even exhilarating at times.
