Almost nine years after the terrible accident that abruptly interrupted their rising career, The Ghost Inside are once again a fully functional band that records and tours normally. In fact they are now more popular than they ever were before.
There is no doubt that it is great news, but it also causes, it is inevitable, that the great enthusiasm that his comeback album aroused in 2020 has little by little dissipated, which leads us to talk about Searching For Solace with a somewhat cooler head and without being conditioned by extra-musical factors. The Ghost Inside are now another group within the overcrowded metalcore scene and this new work sounds exactly like that. The Californians seem totally competent when it comes to executing the style, but something else is missing that differentiates them from the rest.
Like so many others, The Ghost Inside have been incorporating more melody as they progressed in their discography, and although, a priori, it seems like a valid option to enrich your music, it is curious that almost everyone ends up in the same place. If it should be useful to think in more pop terms, it would be so that the songs would stay stuck in your head more easily. But even within this Searching For Solace It’s hard to tell if you’re listening to one song or another. You could take the chorus of the first song ‘Going Under’ and the chorus of the last song ‘Breathless’, swap them, and absolutely nothing would happen. Being Linkin Park is not that easy.
In songs like ‘Death Grip’, ‘Wrath’ or ‘Light Years’, the quintet approaches the latest from Parkway Drive with some heavier touches and some pseudo-industrial cadence, without you detecting anything minimally original. Even the lyrics pivot on mental health and trauma, an important topic that is already being devalued by so much use.
I repeat, the workmanship is impeccable and naturally the most diehard fans of the genre, and yours in particular, will enjoy these 11 songs, but it pains me to say that in a blind test it would be difficult to identify it among the dozens of similar albums that will be published during the anus.
DAVID GARCELL
