Ghost Orchids

Oh, the starkness of it all. Sometimes the world feels like a cold, empty, lonely place made up of a million shades of grey. This EP is a fitting soundtrack to such sentiments. It would nestle in nicely somewhere between your old New Order and Cure albums, with all of its catchy licks and minor chord sensibilities. Yet there is a certain freshness to it, in that it sounds like little else we could be so lucky as to stumble upon these days. I found myself humming the songs the second time I listened to the disc. This San Francisco quintet presents five songs (unfortunately not a full-length CD) and they do a bang up job of creating an ambience with simple bass progressions and lyric structure. It is this simplicity that works so beautifully, making me yearn for those long gone post-punk gothic moments that sometimes appear to have skulked out of existence. The Ghost Orchids are a beaming light at the end of a murky tunnel, helping to keep Canadian gothic/ambient music from flat lining once and for all. For that, and for the 24 minutes on Architecture, I thank them.