Ghostkeeper

THE ALBUM
With their second, self-titled album Ghostkeeper has captured the band's folk-based history and the stylistic shifts with a complex and textured sounding recording. The distinctive voice of Shane Ghostkeeper cuts through the serpentine knots of intricate guitar and thumping cave rhythms that punctuate the songs. Armed with a fully self-aware confidence, this croon – flourished with exhales, sighs, and a stuttered delivery – embodies a modernized 1950's sweetheart style and passionately strides across the album.

Ghostkeeper dedicated themselves to recording on various vintage analogue tape machines in public staircases, parkades, warehouses and engineer Jay Crocker's own studio space. Crocker, with Munro's assistance, later laboriously spliced together the tape to produce a collage of sessions, tied together by the narrative of Shane's storytelling. In some songs, they worked in a relatively backwards manner; first recording the lead vocal in a stairwell, then recording portions in a warehouse space and sewing these disparate elements together. The entire process, while time-consuming and requiring fine attention to detail, captured the band's vision of a jigsaw puzzle of old and new sound.

The result is a mysterious, unusual and nuanced voice, infused with Mississippi roots and traditional folk and country idioms, invigorated with an ever-shifting collage of characteristically inventive and deliciously off-kilter experimental blues and psychedelia.

THE BAND
Calgary-based Ghostkeeper produces raw and electrifying music. A colourful patchwork of heartfelt, outsider blues and noisy pop, perhaps their music can be best understood through the distinctive Northern Alberta origins of Shane Ghostkeeper (vocals, guitar) and Sarah Houle (drums, vocals).

Shane & Sarah spent their adolescence isolated by Northern Alberta's geography, listening to folk and blues records, slowly developing an admiration for individuals that had the ability to convey rich stories through song. When they later expanded their musical horizons beyond these roots they found another world in the self-aware discordance of Pavement and the raw appeal of The Make Up. Here, they developed their own storytelling language with which Shane could voice the traditional songwriting he grew up with and Sarah could provide skewed drum patterns as a backdrop. The addition of Jay Crocker (guitar, vocals) and Scott Munro (bass, vocals), fleshed out the skeletons of Shane's songs into the extraordinary marriage of noisy blues and pop sensibility that became the band Ghostkeeper.

While traditional influences remain at the very core of Shane's songwriting, a healthy irreverence towards standard song structure and an idiosyncratic storytelling voice results in something undeniably Ghostkeeper.

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