BLUE HOUR GHOSTS: Due (MELODIC HARD ROCK): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

After a decade spent in the death metal scene with their band Obivion999, the two guitarists Diego Angeli and Francesco Poggi decided to embark on a different musical project. With the help of four other musicians from different backgrounds, their ambition was to invest in a more eclectic and melodic rock that is embodied in Blue Hour Ghosts. After a first album in 2016 and a live album in the same time, the Italians come back with "Due".

The music of Blue Hour Ghosts is at the antipodes of the underground death metal that accompanied the first musical adventures of its two main composers. But the experience has certainly hardened the character of two musicians who have strategically thought about their reconversion and even if they have to switch to something accessible, they might as well do it with an originality that will ensure them little equivalent in the genre. The style of Blue Hour Ghosts is a baroque variant of heavy rock framed enough not to scatter, with a preponderant melodic base and full of gothic ambiences, acoustic reinforcements and electro sweeteners that soften the edge. The part of the arrangements and sound design in the final rendering of the tracks is major and marked by the artistic and technical investment of the producer Giuseppe "Dualized" Bassi.

The music of Blue Hour Ghosts occupies a relatively vacant place in the landscape, somewhere between the progressive power of DGM (era Tita Tani) and the eclectic rock of Profusion. "Due" thus judiciously alternates dynamic formats ('Walking Backwards', 'Fearless', 'Lower The Wires'), rock with a pop freshness ('Dead in August', the darkwave 'On Black Clouds') and intermediate tracks focused on poignant progressions ('Damn Wrong' or the melancholic mid-tempo with the alternative harshness 'Shine'). Blue Hour Ghosts' talents are multiple and brilliant, especially in refrains that stay in minds thanks to careful vocal developments (the emotional finale 'Involved/Bored', 'Disheartened') and a writing that is both direct and capable of offering embellishments such as the short and punchy bridges of 'Walking Backwards', 'Lower The Wires' and 'Involved/Bored'.

For a second album and knowing from which universe its musicians come from, we bow to the quality and stylistic maturity of 'Due'. The Italians mastered their score from beginning to end and deliver a homogeneous, worked out, accessible and addictive album. If the only flaw of the record is to offer too little to our taste, it also nourishes the certainty that the band has not yet show the full extent of its potential. - Official website

BLUE HOUR GHOSTS

DUE

ROCKSHOTS RECORDS

MELODIC HARD ROCK