Team Ghost

Though Nicolas Framogeau's Team Ghost have become an established and independent project in their own right, he may never escape comparisons to the immense entity that Anthony Gonzalez and M83 have become since his departure. In some ways, his inevitable association with M83 is a shame, but the comparison often feels valid in order to fully understand Fromageau's direction. On Rituals, Team Ghost's first full-length, Fromageau shows that, like Gonzalez, he has the ambition to go big or go home. Unfortunately, this ambition is, at times, misguided. Many of the songs on Rituals are long and layered, often overly so. Team Ghost stack a plethora of different noises and effects on top of one another to create an aura of building immensity, but the songs often end up feeling overproduced. At their best, Team Ghost offer Gonzalez-esque pop with the added touch of a more macabre subject like "Dead Film Star." At their worst, the macabre completely takes over on gothic tracks like "Broken Devices," which just boringly drone on for far too long. "Things Are Sometimes Tragic" sounds like an exaggeratedly drawn-out intro to an evening news program; it's a breaking story that never quite breaks. Team Ghost and Fromageau have a number of good ideas, but the band's biggest downfall stems from the fact that they sometimes condense too many of these ideas into too small a space.