Review & Video Premiere: The Midnight Ghost Train, Cypress Ave.
[Watch the premiere of the lyric video for The Midnight Ghost Train’s ‘The Watchers Nest’ by clicking play above. Cypress Ave. is out July 28 via Napalm Records. Impending tour dates here.]
As the first preliminary details began to surface about Cypress Ave., Topeka, Kansas, heavy blues rockers The Midnight Ghost Train put word out to their listeners to expect something different on this, their fourth album and second for Napalm Records. Their tone was almost a warning more even than a general ‘heads up,’ and for a band who’ve spent the last decade stomping their way across the US and subsequently Europe and whose reputation has always been for a brash, gruff, and full-charged vision of heavy, it struck me as a decidedly human, near-insecure move; for the first time, The Midnight Ghost Train let themselves show some concern for how their work might be received by the audience they worked so hard to build. Clearly it was a warning to take seriously, and it’s one to which Cypress Ave. lives up.
The Midnight Ghost Train debuted on Napalm with 2015’s Cold was the Ground (review here), a mature celebration of what’s made them who they are throughout their career going back through offerings like 2012’s Buffalo (review here), their formative 2009 self-titled debut (review here) and 2008’s The Johnny Boy EP (review here), sounding very much like the payoff moment for a stylistic growth shaped by time on the road as much as an expanded writing palette from band spearhead/guitarist/vocalist Steve Moss. That payoff moment might actually be on Cypress Ave., which outdoes its predecessor in scope, presentation, and its overall level of daring, foreshadowing stylistic turns in opener “Tonight” that range from the melancholia of “The Watchers Nest” and “Black Wave” to the acoustic-centered, unabashed Tom Waits-ery of album centerpiece “Break My Love,” through the jangly spaciousness of “Lemon Trees” and a collaboration with rapper Sonny Cheeba on “The Boogie Down.”
The latter, though admirably funky and an honest acknowledgement of the influence of the various strains of traditionally African American music that have played out in The Midnight Ghost Train‘s sound in their nine years together, from roots-blues to modern hip-hop, is nonetheless the widest “departure” from the rest of the material here, pulling away from the fuzz that serves to unite varied-in-mood cuts like “Red Eyed Junkie Queen” (video premiere here), “The Echo” and “Glenn’s Promise.” And no doubt it’ll be a sticking point for some listeners — because even the threat of rap-rock crossover proved enough to do that even before internet racism was a thing — but on the most basic level, it’s an attempt by Moss, bassist Mike Boyne and drummer Brandon Burghart to shake things up and offer something genuinely unexpected. That doesn’t mean it’s not a head-turning change from the pastoral strum of “Lemon Trees” before it or the tense but quiet “Black Wave” after, but it does mean that that’s very likely the whole point of its being in the first place.
And those of the band’s followers looking for a studio-born manifestation of the riotousness they’ve long been noted as bringing to the stage will find the bursts of energy throughout “Tonight” and “The Watchers Nest,” “The Echo,” “Red Eyed Junkie Queen” and “Bury Me Deep” residing in comfortable-enough terrain, though even these bring forth a style from The Midnight Ghost Train more given to holding its tension than exploding forth from it, showing the band ultimately as more dynamic even within what one might think of as their core sound than they’ve ever been before. To wit, the opening salvo of “Tonight,” “Red Eyed Junkie Queen,” “Glenn’s Promise” and “Bury Me Deep,” which, while basking in some of the most satisfying guitar tone this side of circa-1995 Kyuss — sounds like hyperbole; isn’t — spends as much time gritting its teeth and seething as it does outwardly raging. There’s plenty of rock to be had on Cypress Ave. — plenty — but it’s in the nuance and the sonic caveats that The Midnight Ghost Train define the work they’re doing.
It’s fair to think of that as new ground for them almost as much as “The Boogie Down,” but the point is that even as the band bounces through different styles en route through side B of the 52-minute/11-track outing toward six-minute closer “I Can’t Let You Go,” on which Boyne‘s tone shines nearly as much as that of Moss amid memorable repetitions of the title-line, and a not-in-anymore-of-a-rush-than-it-needs-to-be rhythm given due swing by Burghart, the shifts in aesthetic and the expansion of who they are as a band throughout Cypress Ave. has grown naturally out of what they’ve done prior. Are they consciously making the decision to try new things? Most definitely, but even that is a manifestation of the impulses under which they’ve always functioned. They are, as they warned, delivering something different. In this context and in the sheer front-to-back listening experience, they’re a richer group. They benefit from the chemistry they’ve hard won on tour and succeed in crafting a narrative for who they are that goes beyond the bull-in-a-china-shop raucousness of their earlier outings.
Cypress Ave., like Buffalo before it, touches on a definitive sense of place — its cover art helps in this — but it finds The Midnight Ghost Train pushing a more exploratory sensibility that nonetheless draws strength from its tones, the underlying songcraft and structures with which the songs are executed, and the performances throughout of Moss, Boyne and Burghart, who’ve never sounded more complete and realized as a group than they do here. That’s not to take anything away from their prior work at all or the steps Moss as the band’s founder has taken along the way, including on Cold was the Ground, but as the band approach the decade mark in 2018, one has to acknowledge the bravery in such decided, willful progression. It turns out taking chances suits The Midnight Ghost Train, and one hopes they continue to do so as they move inexorably forward from Cypress Ave. to whatever their next destination may be.
The Midnight Ghost Train, “Red Eyed Junkie Queen” official video
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