Like everyone with a more-than-casual interest in pop music, Deleted Waveform Gatherings fell for rock'n'roll. It fell hard. It fell deep. It fell so hard and deep, in fact, that the Norwegian outfit's getting a little clingy. Ghost, She Said is so head-over-heels with classic rock music -- we're talking the breadth of it from '60s beat to garage to art-punk -- that it hangs onto the past so tightly there's no chance of it ever escaping.
What keeps the band from coming off as just another bunch of psychotically obsessed retro-miners, however, is how broad its love for the old stuff is. Deleted Waveform Gathertings comes at you from several historic touch-points at once. There are those silky-smooth vocal harmonies that suggest a love for good old Merseybeat, while the general-purpose beat-era rhythms surface all over the place, and those somewhat lonely, if still upbeat melodies from the Beatles blow around. There are traces of country rock, mildly lysergic psychedelia, hints of early '70s power pop, mod rock and various flavors of garage rock bouncing around in Ghost, She Said, too.
With all that emphasis on rock's long-gone days, Deleted Waveform Gatherings can't help but sound like grumpy old men who lost all interest in rock music once punk rolled onto the scene and redefined everything. Even at its stodgiest and most stuck in the past, though, Ghost, She Said has its charms, mainly in the band's bizarre ability to plug into old sounds without sounding too derivative. Tracks like "The Shadow of Your Ego" and "Doc" have a way of invoking all sorts of ghosts of the past without getting too specific about it.
It's not just nostalgia on Ghost, She Said, but romanticized nostalgia. You know, we know and Deleted Waveform Gatherings certainly knows this album would never fit in alongside any of its idols. That's the fun, though: There's only so many times we can take a trip down memory lane before you have to start to mix things up to keep it interesting.
- Matt Schild
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