Western Ghost House - Kaleidoscope Tower [Record Review]

The first few seconds of "Varicose Veins", the first track from Western Ghost House's first LP, Kaleidoscope Tower, make it immediately apparent that the band is haunted by something. The track floats in like the prologue to an existential Western, with a single, strummed minor guitar chord repeated over haunting open-throated moans, a trebly lead figure that could've been written by Ennio Morricone, and an unrelenting bass drum and tambourine jangle that leaves no doubt the Devil is just beyond the hills, and he's walking your way.

And that's all before the vocals come in. Jesse Pantoja's wounded tenor has a pure, almost-innocent quality to it, but with just enough grit and resignation to make it sound distorted from singing about love and longing his entire life. His expressive range is impressive: on "You Don't Scare Me", the vocals have an accusatory, backed-into-a-corner timidity, before erupting into a throat-shredding refrain of "you don't scare me!" His voice is the perfect instrument for conveying the themes Western Ghost House explore on Kaleidoscope Tower: these are baroque pop songs about the distances between people, places and ways of being, rooted in rich imagery and adorned with flourishes of strings and keys.

Western Ghost House display some of the same dramatic narrative tendencies as Okkervil River, but they demonstrate impressive restraint. Kaleidoscope Tower works on a vast musical canvas, but it never sounds overcrowded, maintaining sonic and thematic consistency so that listening to it all the way through feels like a journey. Highlights along the way include lead single "Branded" and the plaintive "Festival", and perfect lyrical moments bob up like singular ghosts throughout: "I was born a man/ Not a machine," Pantoja sings, as if pleading for some empathy. The rhythm section of Steven Garcia (bass) and Adrian Carrillo (drums) don't merely drive the songs forward; they embellish the songs from the very middle, while Pantoja and Andrew Romero's hard-driving guitar distortion and minor-key picking drape the songs in starry-eyed longing. it all builds up to the epic, multi-part, six-minute closer "Yesterday", the emotional apotheosis of the album. At the end of all the searching, "All that you see/ Is the archetype of one man," Garcia laments from within a huge swell of guitars and violin. "The demons that you don't want/ Well, they still want you."

Western Ghost House will celebrate the release of Kaleidoscope Tower tonight at the 29th Street Ballroom, supported by The Zoltars and Follow That Bird. All of the proceeds will benefit Attendance Records, a student-run record label "dedicated to bringing creativity back into schools by connecting teachers and students with local writers, artists and musicians."