Album Review: Nine Suns, One Morning by The Silence

Masaki Batoh announced the official demise of Ghost in 2014. Since then, the guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter has been prolific with the Silence. Nine Suns One Morning marks their third full-length outing in a year. Their self-titled debut blended electric and acoustic instruments in spaced-out, organic song forms.

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Eternity, according to a recent interview with Masaki Batoh, is the one idea uniting his various projects. A nice concept: it’s ambiguous enough to cover a multitude of intentions, as well as the shadows and unthought forces amassed, as it were, behind his back when committing something to tape. But in the case of The Silence, it’s a particularly intriguing suggestion, because this project, more even so than Batoh’s others, seems well anchored in a particular 5- to 10-year period of the popular music of the 20th century, both in terms of their studio sound (rich analogue “warmth”) and style (instrumentation, composition, arrangement).

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The Silence — Nine Suns, One Morning (Drag City)Mortality may be on Masaki Batoh’s mind, but it’s not a problem. “Death is regeneration and funeral is a festival,” he sings on “Look Up the Vault,” and while he’s singing about the cycle of life and death on a grand scale, he could be talking about his own creative life. Batoh was the front man of Ghost for 30 years, the last of which appear to have been difficult; no one’s talking, but when it takes a decade to make one new record of songs, one record that was improvised in a day, and one archival collection, it looks like something is gumming up the pipes.

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