New Music from Fever the Ghost

Posted on Sep 17, 2015
New Music from Fever the Ghost

It’s been just over a year since Fever the Ghost began its ascent, starting in LA’s underground scene, releasing the celebrated EP Crab in Honey, touring with Sean Lennon, Temples, and Flaming Lips, and turning heads with a leadoff collaboration with My Morning Jacket and J Mascis on the Lips’ With a Little Help from My Fwends. Yet their debut album, Zirconium Meconium, demonstrates that Fever the Ghost’s success is not the result of hype. Rather, it stems from their gift for sleekly marrying esoteric tendencies with inescapable melodicism, combining interstellar vibrations and a sense of youthful wonder into an unparalleled pop sound.

On an LP dense with otherworldly highlights, “Rounder II” showcases the band’s uncanny ability to synthesize glam elements with psych and Krautrock into addictively groove-based music, while “Hinterland” and “1518” glimmer with mind-bending experimental electronics and oddball vocal effects that are somehow balanced with transcendently catchy pop hooks. Lush moments on the album, like “Sun Moth” and “Peace Crimes,” soar with entrancing atmospheres, while “Vervain (Dreams of an Old Wooden Cage)” and “Fathoms” strike a dynamic balance between delicacy and raucousness and “Equal Pedestrian” sonically tips its hat to the whimsical electro-pop spirit of Yellow Magic Orchestra. Across the album’s 12 songs, Fever the Ghost proves adept at eschewing traditional verse-chorus-verse structures to continually build out its unique, far-out, and expansive musical interpretation of what the band calls “the third dimensional integration process from the perspective of vital force energy incarnating into the physical world.”

“This Fever The Ghost record… sounds like Rush making a version of [The Rolling Stones‘] Satanic Majesties Request… [It] is just not of this dimension. I can’t tell why they are doing what they are doing… I’ve met and played with them and it seemed like… I was in a storybook.”
Wayne Coyne, The Flaming Lips

“‘[The band] floats from one psych-fused style to the next on squeaky, squishy waves of shimmering synths and guitars… Bridges are built on brightly colored, pixelated rubix cubes… that seem to be constantly shifting, yet crossing them feels enlightening rather than dangerous.”
-Consequence of Sound

“The album’s tracks… come across less as songs and more as… episodes on an epic, awe-inspiring journey. … [It’s a record] that may make you forget that other music even exists.”
-LA Record

RIYL: Flaming Lips, Pink Floyd, MGMT, Tame Impala, David Bowie, Kuroma, Foxygen, the Mothers of Invention, Olivia Tremor Control

Recommended Tracks: Track 10 “Vervain (Dreams of an Old Wooden Cage), Track 8 “1518,” “Track 2 “Rounder II,” Track 3 “Hinterland,” Track 4 “Peace Crimes,” Track 7 “Fathoms” 

Label: Complicated Game

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