Grayscale - When The Ghosts Are Gone

Album of the week is not necessarily an album review, nor the album presented a new release, but it's something that has impressed lately, for whatever reason we say.

At the beginning of the 2000s a band called Grayscale took off from the dark forests of Mikkeli, Finland, playing melancholy and slightly gothic metal. Prior to Grayscale, at the end of the 1990s, the band was known as a quartet called Four Bitches, but on the only full length album the band ever released, When the Ghosts Are Gone, the crew comprises six people. Grayscale was buried apparently after the demo Interior World, which was to be their last, in 2004. Later on some of the band members have appeared in such bands as Crimfall and Enthrope.

Basically, Grayscale is Four Bitches taken onto the next level. After using merely harsher vocals during the Four Bitches era, clean vocals have been added beside them, leading the album more towards gothic metal, reminding one of older Entwine and To/Die/For. The same feeling is also prompted by synthesizers which were not yet used during Four Bitches.

Some tracks on When the Ghosts Are Gone are remakes of songs found on Four Bitches' demos, others are previously unheard, newer material. Old songs have been transformed into excellent adaptations for Matti Hämäläinen's clean voice, while some contrast is provided by the guitarist Miika Partonen with his rough voice – just like on the demos. The songs flow delicately accompanied by keyboards and melodic, albeit fairly simple, guitar lines. Melancholy self-destruction theme is present in most songs, and I would hazard a guess certain Lopakka's lyrics notebook has been open somewhere in the background.

It's difficult to point out individual tracks above others, but the most memorable are straightforward and melodically simple The Fire Inside Me, which is about a fading will to live, and musically more saucy Shape In The Shadows. Otherwise the style of the songs throughout the whole album is quite similar – a feature which could be considered a flaw as well.

Grayscale is probably quite an unknown act outside Finland, and hardly particularly famous even when domestically speaking. When The Ghosts Are Gone is still very high-quality material for the lovers of gothic metal, and it's still available for a reasonable price at least in Finnish record stores. All in all, Grayscale is an excellent combination of Sentenced, To/Die/For and Entwine, and quite recommended to the fans of the genre.

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