Last year was a difficult one for the frontmen of Modern Baseball. Jake Ewald suffered the loss of his grandfather, while Brendan Lukens dealt with depression. Both struggled with life on the road in band on the rise. ‘Holy Ghost’ sees them exploring these issues in typically honest style.
As a reflection of their different problems the album is split, with Ewald taking the first half and Lukens the latter. The record launches with the title track, which acts as an introduction to Wedding Singer. Here we are thrown into a great pop-punk riff, chugging guitars and crashing drums, with the song rendered bigger and slicker than anything the band have done before. It’s very much a taste of what’s to come.
There’s an ambition within Modern Baseball, especially on this release, to express more complex themes than many of their pop-punk contemporaries, both musically and lyrically. Hiding, with its poetic lyrics - “Pouring pewter, amassing coins to displace debt to you” - and use of cello, holds off descending into a guitar anthem until the very end.
This sombre song leads the way into Lukens’ side of the record and, accordingly, there is a harsher edge to this half. The guitars are free to wander far away from the confines of the riff and Lukens delivers his lines with an angry and deeply emotional demeanour, leading the band closer to post-harcore territory than they have previously explored. Coding These To Lukens begins like a typical Modern Baseball track, but as soon as Lukens barks the lyrics “spit fire, spit blood, spit fast” you can feel something change.
There’s a nagging uncertainty that stops this album from reaching its full potential, though. There’s an awful lot of different ideas flying around which, when collected together, give it a slight lack of cohesion. When Ewald sings ‘What do I really want to say?’ it is almost too telling.
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