As spooky month continues today...
I bring you a most scary ritual in the form of a Ghost (music band) list!
As you know, I am a massive fan of Ghost and Impera as of writing is still my ALBUM OF THE YEAR 2022.
Click the red text for the IMPERA ALBUM REVIEW!
I was talking to my good friend Zinfandel Steen who is one person many of you know from some mentions here or there or some YouTube videos from the past on my channel. Basically she's a bad-ass American lady who is a good friend of mine. Anyway, we were talking about Ghost, and she listed me her fave songs and I swear I made a Ghost list in the past, but I was mistaken and so today this Papa is going to give you a ritual of a lifetime with The Papa and his Nameless Ghouls.
So if you are ready, come with me and prepare to be tickled internally.
10: Year Zero
Catchy and awesome, Hail Satan and all his awesome forms with this one. It's trending a lot lately with Tiktok as users are using the intro and pausing on footage or pics of their animals in a funny way.
9: Cirice
Ghost are notorious for having multiple layers in their songs and with this one it feels very much like the narrator who is a Priest is calling out a non-believer in the midsts of a service as they feel their presence amongst the rest, and they convince the person best they can to join this religious cult. Cirice is also an older English term for church so a bit of a fun fact for you.
8: Faith
As we all know by now Ghost are pretty Satanic in content but again as I said earlier their songs are multi-layered and as with a lot of media, the listener decides what it means to them. Satan's MO is "do what thou whilst," he watches and hears everything you do. When you sin, you hit a wall, and Satan loves to watch you fall to him. This is one of my personal faves, and it's only quite recent that this song rose up for me and just sucked me into it.
7: Rats
This is literally about the plague of course, but you could also interoperate it as being about organized religion and most likely with the government watching us. Ghost frontman Tobias said this about this track: "It's actually not technically about rodents. It's about something spreading as wildfire and completely destroying things quicker than you know. It was how the plague started in Europe. Not only that, but it was basically a couple of merchant ships that had been over in Crimea. A few of them sailed into the port of Messina in Sicily, and according to the legend, from the ship came rats, and they were carrying the fleas that had this bubonic plague. Almost everyone on the ship was dead and dying." You can't help but to sing along to this one and join in with the "WOah ahh" parts haha. Awesome song live and just the emphasis on the word "RATS" always has sinister intentions coming from the mouth of Papa.
6: Kaiserion
So much goes on with this song and to me, it feels like a big stage show production. A killer opening song for the album of the year IMPERA! The bands mastermind of many faces Tobias Forge was recently interviewed for a cover story newly published over at Kerrang!. In it, he discussed the inspiration for Kaisarion. "There was a building called Caesareum in ancient Alexandria. Roughly what happened was that the teacher and philosopher, Hypatia, was murdered by Christians. She was molested and murdered inside the building, because of her pagan beliefs, because she was a believer in science and real things. This was in the beginning stages of Christianity, when it was just an insane cult, before it got the mandate of a book put together by Romans in 325 to harness that shit. This was like an underground group of terrorists, basically, who couldn’t stand to see some female smart ass preaching or telling people that the world wasn’t flat. And it didn’t happen at the same time, but they also burned down the big library in Alexandria, which must have been an enormous, enormous loss for mankind in terms of knowledge and historic accounts. I think that’s a nice symbol for what you can see now. You can see likenesses of it in public book burnings and stoning and killing everything that doesn’t match with a sort of flat Earth reality that some people live in. Or storming the Capitol and wanting to hang people. It’s a symbol for those sorts of movements that are always targeting smartness and enlightenment, and thinking."
5: Life Eternal
The first time I heard this, it really struck a song with me and made me feel a bit sad, I'll be honest. It makes me think of mortality and two (dare I say) star-crossed lovers, dancing (literally or figuratively) one last time before they are separated or death takes them. I mean it's no secret the album Prequelle has a medieval theme, black plague type setting, and in those days you didn't live long, death could take you at any time, and you had to let go of people you loved too soon. It seems, to me at least, to be questioning whether a love can span beyond one physical lifetime.
4: Hunters Moon
This is GHOST and one of my all-time favourite songs! It’s not your typical metal. It has elements of prog, hard rock, pop, punk, of so many different things that Forge has up his musical sleeve and that's what makes him and this band shine so many others and make them stand out with their mysterious story and characters too.
3: Mary On A Cross
This has become a big trending viral hit song lately thanks again to the power of Tiktok. I never thought I would see this band trend so much thanks to Tiktok nor also mention Tiktok and Ghost in a single sentence yet here we are. Anyway there are again many layers to this some people like to use the song in a sexual manner because of Mary going down aha. I see that and I see you people hehe. This is a bop and so damn catchy. This also in terms of story telling from Ghost's lore, seems like this a confession from Papa Zero about how he still loves Sister Imperator despite her keeping him at a distance. I'm assuming due to the event in the Kiss the Go-Goat video where Papa kissed the fan while Sister watched from the balcony, they were either in a relationship and split, Papa wasn't ready to commit, or Sister was just a very jealous business partner who had a crush on him.
2: Dance Macabre
An absolute BANGER! A cunning good wordplay with Bewitch You in this one. Solid sound and catchy lyrics with just a phenomenal performance vocally from Papa and even more so live. The band's lead singer Tobias Forge said this about the song: "Europe was in this turmoil in the late 1340s, the plague is moving extremely fast. It starts off as the worst flu you've ever had, and then it just goes worse, and then you're dead after three days. So people were lying in the streets, corpses and all the surroundings were just falling apart. All the brothels and pubs were thriving because people started partying literally like there was no tomorrow because they were going to die. They were just going for it. "Dance Macabre" is capturing that joyous nocturnal sort of life in a disco song".
1: Square Hammer
NUMBER 1 ON MY LIST IS THIS MEGA BANGER! This is the song that propelled me full time as a fan of Ghost as prior to this I liked one or two songs in passing. This was different, this was catchy, this stuck to me like glue and for me is a perfect song which balances everything perfect, gets stuck in your head and with you for a long time and makes you blast it on repeat! I was told that this one is very much Ghost delving into the clandestine underworld of Freemasonry and satirizing that establishment the same way they do to organized religions. Intelligent, fascinating, and a kick-ass song.
So my ghouls and ghoulettes, this has been my list and this soul of yours now belongs to Satan and that concludes my list. Please go see GHOST live if you get the chance and give them a lot of love, thanks.
Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this post.
Feel free to share and leave any comments and tweet me with list suggestions.
Stay Ghouly!
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