Ghost Ship Octavius
Delirium

What horrors await on the ghost ship called Octavius? A trio of Americans are there, some with experience from God Forbid and Nevermore and now they have some ghostly tunes for us. It is the second times we get to hear stuff from the ghost ship, their debut was unleashed in 2015 and now through the might of Mighty Music they are giving the world the second one. Delirium is what we are getting and I am not really delirious about what I am hearing when I am listening to this album that wasn’t given the best of cover arts and the band’s logo is very poor. But lets not get too bogged down with the look, lets instead consider the sounds and things; is the album ghostly or ghastly?

Progressive is the genre, or that is how I would like to consider it. Previously mentioned Nevermore is a good comparison, it is fairly heavy I think and it has some depth. The production is very good; the soundscape can be best described as quite appealing. The vocalist is less interesting though, ghastly might be the world; he isn’t really that exciting and doesn’t really bring life to the songs. And the album is long as well, it takes a whole hour to play through it and that is quite long – I think the album is a bit too long to really work, it doesn’t have enough variation to keep one interest for the entirety of the playing time. Perhaps they should have added some more ghostly stuff as well.

I would describe this as a fairly good album but not a great one, it doesn’t really shine anywhere, and there are no great standout tracks or anything like that. When I played through this several times today I didn’t really notice that the songs had stopped and I was just listening through silence through my headphones. When you don’t really notice that an album ends it tends to be that the album isn’t that exciting and I think that is the problem with this album, it is really well produced and well made but the songs just aren’t up to the task to bring out the best from the strong production and musicianship.

The conclusion will have to be that the sound is better than the songs, but the ride on this ghost ship hardly gets you delirious. And I would claim that this album isn’t really good enough to merit anything but a rating in the middle of our scale, too poor to be great but also too good to be bad. I think there are better things to do than taking a ride on the ghost ship called Octavius.

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