Every once in a while, a band comes along that doesn’t just write songs; they build confessionals and then dare you to step inside. Love Ghost’s Gas Mask Wedding is one of those albums. It’s raw, often chaotic, occasionally melodramatic, but in a way that feels earned rather than indulgent. The whole thing reads like a messy diary scrawled in Sharpie, smudged by tears and cigarette smoke, yet somehow still legible enough to hurt.
This is not an album about neat answers. Rather, it is about putting every unresolved ache on the table, about asking “Am I enough?” until the words lose their shape. And that, frankly, makes it fascinating.
The album begins not with a bang, but with something worse: the quiet wreckage after impact. “Car Crash” is sparse, piano-led, and devastatingly direct. It refuses the temptation to cloak pain in noise; instead, it sits there, trembling, staring you down. Devastation doesn’t need to roar; it just needs to exist, unapologetically. And as an opener, it’s a bold flex: here’s our brokenness, deal with it.
Next up, “Scrapbook,” a song that sounds like someone actually ripped the pages out of their heart and sang over the paper cuts. The lyrics veer between earnest longing and theatrical self-destruction. “Rip the pages out of my scrapbook heart / All those words that I kept in the dark.” It’s melodramatic, sure, but that’s the point. Memory is melodrama. Nostalgia isn’t subtle, and Love Ghost don’t try to pretend otherwise. Rather, they lean into it, and the result is catharsis you can sing along to.
“Fucked Up Feelings” is where the honesty sharpens. “I’m in denial but I’m just like you” hits like a confession muttered into the void; too blunt to ignore, too simple to dodge. It’s a song that feels almost uncomfortably personal, and that’s exactly why it works. Love Ghost excel at forcing you to sit in a room with feelings you’d rather avoid, and this track builds the chair.
Enter “Left on Read,” featuring Wiplash. It’s frantic, chaotic, emo-pop with insomnia at its core. The lyrics read like a panic text thread at 3 a.m.; all anxiety, no punctuation, desperate for someone to answer. It’s catchy, but it’s also ugly in a necessary way, a portrait of disconnection in the age of read receipts and ghosted calls.
Then, surprisingly, there’s sunlight. “Sandcastles” (with Zach Goode of Smash Mouth, yes, really) shouldn’t work. Rather, it does, and almost perversely so. It’s a breakup song dressed up like a summer anthem. “I built this castle from sand / I watched it fade in my hands” is a line that could have been drowned in melodrama, but the delivery is bright, almost defiant. It’s heartbreak on the beach, and you can almost taste the salt in the air.
And then we hit “Worth It,” the album’s centerpiece and its most dangerous question. This third collaboration with The Skinner Brothers doesn’t just tread old ground; it detonates it. The melodies hang like storm clouds, the guitars swell like walls closing in, and then the solo arrives: sharp, brief, and absolutely surgical. It doesn’t flourish; it stabs.
Lyrically, this is the gut-punch. “I tried my best and it wasn’t even worth it / Screaming in my head, asking if I deserve it.” No metaphors, no masks. Just raw despair, uncut. The repetition of “Am I worth it? Worth it…” turns into a mantra of self-doubt, the kind that burrows under your skin and refuses to leave.
This is the moment Gas Mask Wedding stops being a collection of songs and starts being a bloodletting.
The back half veers into stranger, darker territory. “Hallucinations” feels like drowning in a dream, lyrics scattered like broken glass. “I’m in the ocean and my boat is broken / No need to scream, I’m floating.” It’s woozy, fragmented, deliberately unstable. “Reverie” carries the same energy but makes it sharper, angrier; like a bad dream you can’t wake from. These tracks aren’t singles. Rather, they’re scars.
And finally, “Spirit Box.” If “Car Crash” was the confession, this is the echo. A three-minute séance of unresolved ache, the song doesn’t end so much as it fades into mist. Sparse, ghostly, almost cruel in its restraint, it leaves you with silence that somehow feels louder than noise. It’s not closure; it’s haunting. Which, frankly, is the right choice.
Gas Mask Wedding is not an easy album, nor is it trying to be. It doesn’t flatter its listeners, doesn’t sugarcoat its pain. It is messy, bruised, and often melodramatic; but that melodrama is the point. Love Ghost don’t just write about heartbreak, trauma, or doubt. Rather, they let those things live in the music, uncontained, unpolished, and loud enough to force recognition.
It’s not perfect. Sometimes it sprawls. Sometimes it teeters on the edge of indulgence. But honestly? That’s why it works. Perfection would make this sterile. Flaws make it human.
Love Ghost have given us an album that doesn’t just play through your speakers; it lingers in your head like an argument you’re still losing. It doesn’t solve the problems it raises, because how could it? Rather, it gives them shape, puts them in your face, and dares you to keep listening. Basically, Love Ghost’ Gas Mask Wedding is cathartic, uncomfortable, and unforgettable. It’s not here to soothe. It’s here to haunt.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
