The Burning Hell - Ghost Palace
You’ve Changed Records
Released on March 7th, 2025
The Burning Hell’s Ghost Palace is a mischievous and defiant celebration of hope and humanity in the face of Armageddon. The band describes their music as “party anthems about the apocalypse,” and serves up clever and poignant observations about the end of the world, the “debatable usefulness of nostalgia,” and people finding joy in ambivalent pasts and ugly futures.
The BH excels at light takes on morbid topics; the opening track, “Celebrities in Cemeteries,” tackles celebrity death-worship as a tourist attraction, abounding with witticisms like “We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking for a bar.”
Also concerned with memorabilia, “Summer Olympics on TV” is a strangely touching rock n roll song in which a couple combs through one of their parents’ basements for vintage odds and ends. Approximate era and locality are established via “an unlucky busker who covers Skynyrd and Sheeran and RHCP,” but the duo, venturing out, soon stumble upon “The Museum of Your Own Past, Future, and Present,” which is predictably expensive and unpleasant-looking. Lyrics rich in fine detail paint a vivid picture of the little things that make up a good phase—or good relationship, or good life.
Themes of loss, preservation, and recollection recur throughout, whether it’s preoccupation with how one will be remembered after death, sentimentality over the mundanities of a particular time and place, or the sweet anemoia of “What Does it do, How Does it Work,” which recalls the eclectic tongue-in-cheek storytelling-style of the Magnetic Fields (“In the woods somewhere a circus bear is working through his trauma / In the town the clown who freed the bear folds polka-dot pyjamas”).
Their lyrical dexterity might remind listeners of facetious-leaning acts like Flight of the Concords—like, for instance, “Luna FM,” in which a homesick radio host laments his decision to take an off-world gig: “‘You’ll be a pioneer’ they said, ‘the first DJ in space,’ they said …”—while earnest indie harmonies bear similarities to other Canadian folk-rock bands like Said the Whale.
The BH comfortably straddles genres, landing a fiddle-laden honky-tonk tune mid-set. “Duck or Decorated Shed” lectures on an architectural theory from the 1960s, exploring the line between authenticity and affectation. As the song rollicks along, the songwriter extends the metaphor to humans in a way that he admits is “undeniably beguiling if not entirely correct.”
Inevitably, the band engages with the apocalypse. In “My Home Planet,” two space-travelling human refugees struggle to convey their endearment toward the motherland, where “there’s plastic in the water and there’s plastic in the clouds,” and “some people are illegal and some people are allowed,” while in “Brazil Nuts and Blue Caraçao,” survivors hunker down in an abandoned resort. Despite the larders shrinking down to those two titular staples, it’s a surprisingly utopian version of the End Times: “To be honest I expected this would all be more stressful / But Gary is a hunter and he’s usually successful.”
Perhaps further into the collapse, “Strange Paradise” imagines the last bird with memories of humans finally getting distracted and forgetting us. The song’s bridge ominously chides, “We always chose dare, never chose truth / Read the message in the stars from a tomb with a view.” Following this, the closing track, “Ghost Palace,” depicts an escapee of Earth sadly “remembering a place that won’t remember me.”
In the deft hands of the Burning Hell, these pessimistic predictions manage to elicit more gratitude than despair. Bleakness coexists with appreciation and humour, potentially providing inspiration for our doomed species to want to stick around here after all, to not have to say, “Goodbye, cool world.” Ghost Palace delves into memory and imagination, delivering captivating snapshots of pasts and futures that vary between tragic, funny, and undeniably beguiling—if not entirely correct.
- Ava Glendinning