You can trust Louder
Ghost’s success is built on theatrical blasphemy, winking provocation and some blockbusting tunes. The masked Swedes’ third covers EP ticks all three boxes, even if the tunes belong to someone else.
As always, singer and conceptual mastermind Tobias Forge has chosen five songs that fit his band’s worldview while fusing their musical DNA with his own.
Genesis’ anti-televangelist broadside Jesus He Knows Me becomes a high-camp retro-metal anthem, Forge amplifies the Easter-based gag in The Stranglers’ Hanging Around, and his epic update of Tina Turner’s We Don’t Need Another Hero is crying out for someone to remake Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome so it can appear on the soundtrack.
It doesn’t always work (their take on Television’s See No Evil is heavy-handed, while Iron Maiden’s Phantom Of The Opera is too respectful), but mostly it’s devilishly good fun.
Dave Everley has been writing about and occasionally humming along to music since the early 90s. During that time, he has been Deputy Editor on Kerrang! and Classic Rock, Associate Editor on Q magazine and staff writer/tea boy on Raw, not necessarily in that order. He has written for Metal Hammer, Louder, Prog, the Observer, Select, Mojo, the Evening Standard and the totally legendary Ultrakill. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago.