Style: Too many to count
Primary Emotions/Themes: A melting pot of styles that should never have worked but somehow end up creating an excellent album
Thoughts: Bargain bins can be an amazing thing. I bought this album for two United States dollary doos. The cover looked cool, that was good enough for me. I had no idea what was on these two discs, but I don't think any amount of preparation could have made me ready for the contents of Invent Modest Fires.
Ghost Cauldron is many things. It is a collection of dark, yet catchy, groove infected songs that span several genres. These genres range from trip-hop to gangsta rap to ambient to drum and bass (or jungle if you prefer) to new age to straight up rock.
Rather than try and break every single genre/song down (nearly impossible), I'm focusing on the overall feelings that the album leaves me with. First off the album is dark, not in an absolute absence of light type way but rather in a more realistic, the world is going to fuck you up kind of way. A sense that the odds are stacked against you and there is little you can do to fight it. You can either embrace the darkness or try to fight it, but that is a futile battle. Invent Modest Fires fully embraces the darkness.
It explores this darkness in various ways. Some more overt than others. For instance the opening track Fire Walk With Me is largely instrumental and sets the dark tone for the album straight off the bat. This is propagated throughout the remaining tracks, and I love every second of it. The whole thing works so well when in reality it should just be a garbled mess of songs.
Ghost Cauldron is the reason why I go through bargain bins. 95% of the time I only find trash, but sometimes you strike gold. You find that obscure album that no one has ever heard of, but now its in your collection and it's made better for being there.
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