Butch Walker’s new release ‘Afraid Of Ghosts’ is a record to cry to.
While he may fear demons, he’s certainly not afraid to show his feelings. Once his soft soul voice enters your sonic surroundings, gentle melodies penetrate the heart. Love, heartache, despair – it’s a sweet catharsis for your own trouble. In a way, Walker is a martyr of sentiment; suffering so the listener’s pain can be soothed.
He says himself that ‘21+’ – a heart-and-soul track featuring Johnny Depp on guitar – is “for your sad days”. Bleeding with ‘ooooohs’, Walker’s echoing vocals could liquefy a rock mountain as they evaporate into emotions. And once the trickling piano keys join the walling guitar strums, a warm melancholy sets in and creates an infectious resonance. Despite its tear-jerking nature, the song is not a shallow sob, but a sophisticated harmony rich in variation, but with all elements in-sync.
A similar intimacy is shared in ‘Afraid Of Ghosts’. It’s got the around-the-fire closeness of a singer-songwriter-style song, but exceeds it in musical virility. Walker’s voice sounds like a lump of sandpaper wrapped in cashmere, rough inside but charmingly soft around the edges. As he’s “coming to terms with a ghost” – most probably a reference to his father ‘Big Butch’ who passed away in 2013 – he deals with the sad perplexity of a life-once-been. It’s unashamedly tender, and shows off Walker’s mood-setting song-writing talent.
Equally ambient but less heartbreaking is ‘Bed On Fire’. Addressed to ‘his kill’, the tune is – as the title suggests – a hot and steamy account of desire. Higher pitched, Walker reminds us of feverish 90s r&b – well, almost at least. A little less on-heat, yet just as yearning in tone is ‘Still Drunk’. Looking back at a romance in 1993, the song has the flair of a storytelling country song. Yet its benign acoustic strum furnishes it with a softer personality than the rough-edged, been-through-it-all country singer generally has.
The most important song on the record is perhaps ‘How Are Things Love’. It’s not only deeply soulful, but intriguingly dark. As the song progresses with its raspy whisper and slow, swaying but steady percussion, it feels as though a sense of immorality, even danger, is creeping in. Like a gradually expanding rain cloud can forebode a developing threat in a horror film, the track seems to advance from mildly shaded to pitch dark. It’s a long, deep passage that’s interspersed by occasionally orgasming guitars, which act so dilatant you’d imagine their soundwaves would be able to form caves if played underneath the earth’s surface.
If you’re not in the right mood, ‘Afraid Of Ghosts’ might not do you any good, but it’s certainly one to keep safe for the days when nothing seems right any more. Although it might not uplift your mood instantly, it lets you go through the necessary stages to heal. It’s as if – even without listening to the lyrics – the music takes on a persona, the subtly varying instrumental and vocal elements do what a hurting human would do, creating a phantom that’s bursting with affectivity.
This honesty and acceptance of sorrow makes us feel comfortable, because sometimes we don’t realise that all we need to do is weep.
