Team Ghost – Celebrate What You Can’t See

With the release of Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts M83 established themselves unequivocally as among the leading experts in contemporary electronic music. The visceral impact of Dead Cities… was undeniable. As an album it ranks alongside other great works of boundary-crossing IDM/electronica such as Richard D. James Album, Endtroducing, Music Has the Right to Children, One Word Extinguisher and Untrue.

Since Fromageau – the founder of Team Ghost - departed from M83, Anthony Gonzalez and co. have continued to release great albums, but nothing on the scale of Dead Cities. From the first moments of Team Ghost’s second EP Celebrate What You Can’t See it is apparent to see what Gonzalez has been missing. Whereas M83 have increasingly released vocal-driven pop songs, Fromageau is simply a master of blissed-out walls of ambience and guitar that give Team Ghost colossal heft.

Where Team Ghost’s debut EP You Never Did Anything Wrong To Me was fast-paced and heavily guitar-driven, almost wrenching the band away from Fromageau’s past, Celebrate… is a far more restrained and polished effort. Opening track ‘High Hopes’ is shoegaze-inspired electronic music at its most epic, a song that wears its heart on its sleeve with such determination that it would be laughable, were it not so deftly executed. ‘High Hopes’ is followed by a couplet of understated ambient pieces, ‘Celebrate What You Can’t See’ and ‘It’s Been a Long Way, But We’re Free’. The former in particular is simply a combination of a long, drawn-out synth note, a delayed guitar loop and some arpeggiated strings. Simplicity is a pattern in Celebrate… where many of the songs are short exercises in atmosphere, typically covering just one or two movements and often cutting short of any pronounced climax. The balance between energy and restraint is an important dynamic in the EP which prevents the experience from becoming as overwhelming as You Never Did Anything Wrong To Me.

The EP’s penultimate track, ‘Signs & Wonders’, again whips out the full arsenal of distorted guitars, synths, crashing cymbals and strings, offset by muted, almost shy, vocals. Finally the EP closes with ‘Into My Arms’; a single, undulating refrain paired with bashful vocals which shows how a well-programmed synth need never become boring. These two closing tracks are perhaps the strongest of the release, amply demonstrating the dynamic capabilities of the band, and the dying chorus of ‘Into My Arms’ will haunt you long after its short duration is over.

Celebrate What You Can’t See may never tread far from its safety zone, it is by no means a challenging record. Rather it is an immediate, powerful and deftly executed exercise in confident expertise. We’ve been missing this level of commitment since Dead Cities…, and it is so very gratifying to have it back.