Photo: Press
Holy Ghost is Modern Baseball's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, according to the band's two-man creative engine room Brendan Lukens and Jake Ewald. And while anyone familiar with the Philadelphia indie-slackers' first two albums might have reasonably recoiled in horror at the idea, what we get is a two-part record far more coherent than anything they've previously recorded.
The first half belongs to Ewald, who for the first time explores the intersection between his religious upbringing and small-town ennui, the latter having been covered with slightly less gravitas on previous releases. This new grounding, in themes that seem intensely personal yet somehow relatable, brings forth a quality not really seen before in Modern Baseball's canon.
The goofball antics are gone but wistfully referenced in songs such as 'Wedding Singer', a Pavement-meets-Strokes banger that talks of frustrated, immature romance at a lost midnight hour. 'Mass' takes a Jeffrey Lewis-esque approach to spelling out unambiguously what is causing the author pain (in this case the fact that his baby is in Massachusetts instead of south Philly).
It's incredibly effective, especially when complemented by vignettes of sympathy for Jeanette the disenchanted cashier. Lukens' second half is, unsurprisingly given recent struggles with bi-polar disorder and an attempted suicide, more immediately intense in feeling. 'Hidden' announces the second songwriter's intentions with an acoustic first half that gives way to a pounding, descending riff that straight away heralds something heavier than before: both sonically and emotionally.
'Apple Cider, I don't Mind' could be Arcade Fire in one of their most four-to-the-floor moments, while 'Just Another Face' is a cathartic release that ends the album on a wonderfully defiant note. Events, as horrible as they must have been, seem to have brought Modern Baseball together and propelled them to another stage in their career. Holy Ghost is a wonderful record and one that, paradoxically, has wider appeal by shining a forensic light on some of the finer details of their own personal issues.
