IMPERA

Prequelle, Ghost's 2018 album, was disturbingly prescient in its reflection on historic pandemics from the Black Plague to the Spanish Flu. When they abandoned early sessions in April 2020 due to COVID-19, déjà-vu must have hit hard. It took another two years to complete Impera, a hook-saturated riff celebration of floor-stomping stadium rock offering equally prescient commentary on the rise and fall of empires. Written during the contentious American presidential election of 2020, it was released during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Ghost's wildly flamboyant Cardinal Copia from Prequelle has been appointed Papa Emeritus IV by an unholy see. Frontman and songwriter Tobias Forge was deeply influenced by Timothy H. Parsons' book, The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall. His songs borrow from its themes, ranging across history, mystery, love, hate, pain, death, and transformation, with requisite rock pomp and grandeur. The band re-enlisted producer Klas Ahlund and mixing engineer Andy Wallace (2015's Meliora), while drawing musical inspiration from sources as varied as '80s hair metal, the theatrical rock of Jim Steinman and Andrew Lloyd Webber, and AOR sources from Queen and Metallica to early Judas Priest.
The set-opening title track is a cinematic instrumental filled with dual lead guitars (throughout the album guitars are played by Opeth's Fredrik Åkesson), thundering tom-toms and kick drums, piano, keyboards, and swelling strings. It gives way majestically to "Kaisarion" with an introductory Forge scream. Ghost kicks in with a driving beat (courtesy of drummer Hux Nettermalm) and a massive, chugging hook. It's titled for the son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, the last Pharoah. "Spillways," the first of five tunes co-written by Forge with Swedish hitmakers Salem al Fakir and Vince Pontare, weds the piano motif in ABBA's "Money, Money, Money" to Bon Jovi's "Runaway" (played beautifully by Martin Hederos) inside a bombastic melody worthy of vintage Blue Öyster Cult. "Call Me Little Sunshine" commences with a crunchy vamp that sets up a minor-key, multi-tracked vocal before drums and a booming chorus chant "you will never walk alone...." suggesting '80s Def Leppard. First single, "Hunter's Moon," about the empire of childhood, careens across doomy, synth-laden hard rock. "Watcher in the Skies" offers an enormous fist-pumping riff that equates early Rob Zombie and Whitesnake in an intricate melody that joins Boston and Dio, appended by spiky twin-guitar dexterity and sweeping vocals. The stellar power ballad "Darkness at the Heart of My Love" showcases a soaring choir in a lyric and melody that suggests a collaboration between Glenn Danzig and Steinman. In quality it rises to the level of the band's "Dance Macabre." Finale "Respite on Spital Fields," about Jack the Ripper, offers an arrangement that touches on Alice Cooper, Rush, and vintage Nightwish. Impera is the most unabashed exercise in exultant pop/rock sheen Ghost has issued to date; it establishes an exquisite front in their own quest for global rock domination. ~ Thom Jurek