The Burning Hell have been writing party anthems about the apocalypse since before the apocalypse arrived at the party. With “Ghost Palace,” the band presents their most joyful collection of songs about death to date, always finding something to smile about in the decay. Mathias Kom’s maximalist lyrics are underlined with fluorescent highlighter, with surprising twists and turns through pop culture, animal life, history, architecture, and science fiction. Pathos and bathos vie for equal time, the sublime snuggling up with the trivial, revealing moments of humour and beauty in the mire. 

 

But “Ghost Palace” doesn’t dwell directly on the end of the world. Instead, the songs assume that our time running out is a foregone conclusion, and focus instead on what we might leave behind when we go, what might endure, and what surprises might be found amidst the remnants. Memory and the debatable usefulness of nostalgia are primary concerns here, peppered with occasional suggestions that we just might still contain the tiny, hopeful seeds of our own redemption through community and balance.    

 

Though the core of the band remains the duo of Mathias Kom and Ariel Sharratt, working from their home in the woods of eastern Prince Edward Island, frequent collaborator Jake Nicoll produced and mixed “Ghost Palace”, and newest band member Maria Peddle added fiddle and vocals. The band solicited additional help from Steven Lambke (lead guitar), Carlie Howell (double bass), Amy Nicoll (oboe) and José Contreras (organ).

 

“Ghost Palace” offers a densely layered journey, with genre-crossing elements and instrumentation, and frequent nods to unexpected influences. “Brazil Nuts and Blue Curaçao” is the band’s take on “Margaritaville” for the post-apocalyptic vacationer, a beach jam about an abandoned resort where - in spite of collapse and ruin - a kind of broken utopia emerges. 

 

Elsewhere, the band finds things to dance about in the scrap-pile of human memory. “Bottle of Chianti, Cheese and Charcuterie Board” is an off-kilter synth and double-bass hip-shaker about the ways we reduce our lives to the fragments of bourgeois luxury that we can’t take with us when we go. “Summer Olympics” is a rock song about the strange, hyper-specific moments that stick in our minds, hinting that details might be more important than the broader strokes of time.

 

But instead of taking an entirely dim view of our collective humanity, The Burning Hell searches for (and always finds) things to celebrate. “Celebrities in Cemeteries” is a joyful ode to the relationship between fame and mortality, and the ways our death rituals can retroactively beautify and dramatize a life. “Duck vs. Decorated Shed” is a country song that takes the ground-breaking architectural theories of Rob Venturi and Denise Scott Brown as a metaphor for not being afraid of showing the world exactly what you are.

 

“Ghost Palace” also wonders at the post-planet future. After we finish making Earth uninhabitable for ourselves, where do we go, and who gets to go there? Are heaven and outer space the same thing? “My Home Planet” is sung from the perspective of two Earthlings arriving on a new world, trying to convince the local administration to let them stay in spite of how badly they’ve botched things back home. “Luna FM” is the story of the first radio station on the moon, helmed by the galaxy’s loneliest DJ.

 

Finally, long after we’re gone, what if the last creature that remembers our species is a small brown bird at an abandoned service station? And what happens when the bird gets distracted by something shiny, and forgets all about us? “Strange Paradise” is a eulogy for our fragments, dressed in a rickety skeleton of acoustic noise. Album-closer “Ghost Palace” is a farewell to the abandoned castle of our memories: “We’ll leave all the lights on / We’ll see them shine for a while, after we’ve gone… Goodbye, cool world!”

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