At first, the name of DM Stith’s debut album, Heavy Ghost, seems like nothing more than a silly oxymoron. After listening, though, the name becomes a perfect fit, accurately catching the otherworldly beauty of Stith’s spooky, superlative chamber pop.
The album begins with a sinister piano shuffle that ushers in “Isaac’s Song.” Soon, a mumbling choir of what sounds like the dead digging themselves out of their graves chimes in, before the song erupts into clamouring voices and clattering percussion. The song then fades into “Pity Dance,” in which a slowly strummed acoustic guitar emerges in front of a series of clicks and horror movie atmospherics. The choir of the dead makes a return with some absolutely spine-tingling background vocals. In the centre of all of this is Stith’s rich voice, which scales mountains and plummets into vast canyons to sing “I’ll tell the truth/ I’ve been sleeping with the lights on ever since I left you.”
Stith sure-footedly travels a dark and gorgeous path throughout Heavy Ghost. Some listeners will notice a touch of Grizzly Bear in Stith’s music, but the album revels in far too twisted and unconventional a world to draw anything more than superficial comparisons. Heavy Ghost is its own wonderfully realized entity, and is almost certainly album-of-the-year material.
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