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