Premiere: The Ghost Gardener & Gloria’s Garden
3/25/22 | J. Proust
This serendipitous split between Italy’s one-man operation The Ghost Gardener and North American trio Gloria’s Garden seems an all-too-easy match to make, yet what makes this a successful split has nothing to do with either band’s moniker.
The post-black metal workhorse of Turin known as The Ghost Gardener has stacked up an impressive discography since beginning in 2020. Then, at the very end of last year, The Ghost Gardener punctuated their run of smaller releases with their brilliant full-length, Knight with flower armour. Their split with Gloria’s Garden will be their first release of the new year. Across the two tracks that compose their opening side of the split, The Ghost Gardener show themselves to have grown beyond their established latticework, approaching, at times, something far more psychedelic and transcendental than post-black metal.
Gloria’s Garden being the pet project of American black metal bandits Pallisade and Roanoke with Calling of Phasmic Presence’s B.L. joining them once again. True, these three also do Thy Heart, Thine Kingdom together, but Gloria’s Garden is all together much different band. Gloria’s Garden is arguably the most punk-primitive and straight-forward project, and yet even that simple fact becomes warped by the time the three songs here presented under the name Gloria’s Garden are done. The first two woodchoppers pass by full of rage and blister—the latter featuring the wrath of Celestial Sword—but an off-kilter keyboard melody and the two-fold ghastly howlings of B.L. lends the closer a dizzying, narcotic effect.
The split will come out on tape soon from Ethereal Witchery with vinyl to follow from Oaken Fog.
