Bridges and Powerlines – Ghost Types

Citybird Records

Do we listen to music to soar, to laugh, to rock to the beat, or rise to a higher consciousness? The right album can do all that, and Bridges and Powerlines’ debut, Ghost Types is such an album.

The music stumbles and falls at the beginning in “Uncalibrated,” but it is quite deliberate, as this group has been described as quirky. Bridges and Powerlines make pretty music and a hard-driven beat duke it out. "Floods and Fields” starts out with distinct finger picking. Then the music rises like a wave and takes off like a galloping horse. The beat is good on "The Golden Age," but it's great on “The Thieves, They are Everywhere,” which scintillates, melding with the beautiful vocals. On "Half a Cent,” the music rocks, and by the time we’ve reached “Middle Child,” “The Ghost Types,” “New Mexico” and the rest, the sound is perfectly exhilarating. At this point, what becomes paramount is the story.

The words are what New York power pop band Bridges and Powerlines is all about. Andrew Wood, Keith Sigel, and John Crockett - who have been compared to ‘80s British post-punk bands and ‘60s garage bands - spent much of 2007 “meticulously crafting a diverse collection of stories about male protagonists struggling with maturity in the face of boyhood impulses.” You would have to listen to this album more than once to get all of the words.

Ghost Types is a typical rock album in that, most of the time, all of the musical instruments, including vocals, are generally at the same volume. Since their lyrics are important to them, the group might want to consider making the vocals more prominent than the rest of the instruments on future albums.

One intriguing, quirky, aspect of this CD is the cover art, which depicts old bicycles. When asked whether these images were relevant to the music, Keith, speaking for the band, said, “the theme of the record is persistence of childish emotions and memories into adulthood, sort of the conflict of happy childhood images with the reality of a tough adult world… We wanted the album art to have a strong image that reflected this idea of a nostalgic childhood image – the cover is supposed to be a ghost bicycle.”

Review by Patricia Ethelwyn Lang