Confessed to as a record examining his inner turmoil and reckoning with a history of depression and insomnia, Tyler Costolo's self-titled EP of his Ghost Fan Club project is a worthy detour from the sundrowning, distortion-well-diving trance of Two Meters. While easier on the ears and more soluble to one's consciousness, the self-titled record still grapples with a mess of constrictive emotions that bind the author to a flotsam of weighty, digressive dissolutions concerning permanence and purpose. At one point, Tyler discusses the fact that he nearly ended his own life before it had a chance to start (apparently, he was wrapped in his own umbilical cord at birth), and this revelation sets a certain tenor for the album's wider explorations of death, the void, and the parade of small tarnished wonders that strings the two together like a length of flickering and fractured Christmas lights. There is a certain affection for absences here, one which is filled out with bendy nods to the contorted psychic-musculature and preferential chord progression of Modest Mouse as well as the serenely caustic and pacifying style of strumming reminiscent of Mount Eerie's plaintive grip, styles which combine with the lyrics to give the impression that things are both out of place, and in places where they are slowly evaporating and won't be for long- a procession para-quotidian flutterings and ghosts in the process of becoming rooted to oblivion- the settling of space and erection for a clubhouse for those who have gone missing while standing in plain sight.
