SPRAWLING COLORED LIGHTS

13ghosts are a ten year old band...news to me as their apparent fourth album The Strangest Colored Lights (Skybucket) seeps through my headphones. Of course with a close ear on the album, their age and season is obvious enough. Inexperienced bands generally don’t plod through as much sonic terrain as 13ghosts. They also usually don’t have the privilege of recording an album in a studio specifically built for the project. Yet that is just what Buzz Russell, Jason Lucia, Sammy Boggan, Brad Armstrong and Andrew Vernon did when it came time to follow up their nichely acclaimed ’06 release, Cicada.

Much like Blitzen Trapper’s Wild Mountain Nation, The Strangest Colored Lights grabs at shockingly profound amounts of musical nuggets. Scooping up various morsels of Americana, blues, country, fuzz pop, and psychodelia, 13ghosts cover plenty of ground throughout the album’s 55 minutes…all while somehow keeping an overall sense of cohesiveness from slipping through their fingers. But where Blitzen Trapper ultimately lean on the poppier scrappiness of mentors like Pavement, 13ghosts find their primary influence in darker ideas a little further back along rock’s historical timeline. With a knack for skewing towards sprawling and spacey, lo-fi guitar jams, listeners will be hard pressed to ignore the obvious effect Pink Floyd has had over the years.

The Strangest Colored Lights will be released this coming Tuesday on Skybucket. 13ghosts have a few Southern dates currently scheduled. – David Pitz

13ghosts on Tour
Mar 29 - Standard Deluxe - Waverly, Alabama
Apr 10 - Caledonia Lounge - Athens, Georgia
Apr 12 - Bottletree Cafe - Birmingham, Alabama
Apr 25 - The Smokehouse - Florence, Alabama

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MP3: 13ghosts:: "The Lonely Death of Space Avenger" – The Strangest Colored Lights
MP3: 13ghosts:: "Beyond the Door" – The Strangest Colored Lights
13ghosts @ MySpace