Some Ghosts

Sleep Soon (2020)

ChurchillDowns

If one were to damn Some Ghosts with faint praise, they'd say something like "Sleep Soon, the band's debut EP, is an enthusiastic bit of Thursday cosplay."

Which, look. It gives me no pleasure to diminish what is, essentially, an exciting and competent four song run from a band that shows a great deal of promise, but that shitty little sentence is there for a reason. Large swatches of these four songs borrow from a pretty specific and narrow set of emo touchpoints. Credit to Some Ghosts for zagging; going overboard on twinkle-tapping, alternate tuning and acid-jazz freak-outs is very much in vogue for emo's current moment. Knuckling down and writing a five-and-a-half minute precision-stomp beefcake like "Maple Ave," a song that sounds like it belongs on War All the Time or the back-half of Louder Now is genuinely anachronistic.

Actually writing it, too. Another way in which Some Ghosts zag a bit is they take a traditionalist approach to lyric writing and delivery. There's no Kinsella-esque tendency to turn a two-syllable word into a 14-second ordeal at play on Sleep Soon. One can quibble over the effectiveness of those lyrics (your mileage may vary on couplets like "You left a bad mark a big scar / and this house feels like a graveyard / I’m still here I didn't get far."), but you'll come away from the release with the impression that a lot of thought and care went into their placement and delivery

Boy, this is a lot of Big Picturing for a four-song EP, isn't it? Generally speaking, this thing sounds like a pop-punk band growing out their bangs in real time; the title track is the kind of driving, assertive bleak-punk that made Off With Their Heads a favorite around here; "Complacent Dumb" is an acoustic-driven, vaguely indie-rock arrangement that sits nicely as an outlier to the rest of the collection, "Silver Lake" is the request slower bummer, and "Maple Ave" is the big-swing closer.

Let's go back to that bitchy put-down at the top with a glass-half-full attitude. Sleep Soon is the sound of a band confidently using established genre hallmarks as a means to carve out their own sound. If Some Ghosts haven't full emerged from the cocoon yet, they'll be beautiful butterflies soon. One to keep an eye on.