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It’s tempting to reach for the low-hanging fruit when it comes to reviewing The Burning Hell: songwriter Mathias Kom is literate and droll and acerbic, his quickfire songs sound like a millennial David Berman with more belly laughs, the music sits somewhere between rowdy anti-folk and peppy, punky indie. That is all true, but it ignores the bigger picture. For a while now – at least since 2017’s Revival Beach – Kom has nurtured a lyrical fixation with perhaps the most serious theme imaginable: the end of everything, or at least everything that we know. While on Revival Beach, he showed us a series of snapshots of our final days, Ghost Palace goes a step further and describes a world in retrospect, with Kom acting as a kind of post-human all-seeing eye, looking back on our foibles and idiosyncrasies with his usual deadpan wit.
In these songs, existential dread has all but vanished, replaced by a kind of spaced-out neutrality which often leans into science fiction tropes, examining the links between nostalgia and impossible futures. Luna FM is a kind of future folk-funk odyssey about the first DJ on the moon, but really, it is about loneliness, deracination, and dislocation. My Home Planet sees Kom joined on lead vocals by long-term partner in crime Ariel Sharratt for a brisk, breezy new-wave blast of a song about two of the Earth’s last inhabitants attempting to find a home on a sceptical new world.
Sharratt’s skills as a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist have long been an integral part of The Burning Hell’s sound. The adaptability and variety she brings to Kom’s songs ensure they can veer off at will into various genres, an approach that suits Kom’s lyrical style and often eclectic references. Here, the pair are joined by frequent collaborator Jake Nicoll, who is in charge of production and mixing, and new recruit Maria Peddle, who adds violin. There are also a whole host of guest musicians, resulting in a sound that is fuller and more complex than previous albums.
But, as always, the most striking thing is Kom’s lyrical talent. He is never less than surprising and often approaches a kind of poetry, profane and profound in equal measure. Celebrities in Cemeteries explores our morbid fascination with the famous and the dead and finds shreds of humanity in our weird habits. Brazil Nuts and Blue Curacao fronts up as a kind of apocalyptic DIY tropicalia but becomes a kind of paean to shared experience and communal living. It’s typical of Kom to find positives without losing any of his bite.
There are so many unique and bizarre images on Ghost Palace that it would be impossible to talk about even a fraction of them in one review. What Does It Do and How Does It Work alone contains lines about traumatised circus bears, conversant trees, a crazed Adam and Eve, a reluctant junior soccer coach, a clown in polka-dot pyjamas: Kom’s worlds may be at an end or beyond redemption, growing emptier of human life by the minute, but they are always populated with this kind of colour and variation, and it is to his credit that his songs tacitly acknowledge the irony in this state of affairs. Bottle of Chianti, Cheese and Charcuterie Board enumerates various bourgeois ways of enjoying life while revelling in their very ridiculousness. Summer Olympics is the flip side of this idea: an upbeat indie-rocker that invites you to enjoy the small, important moments in life, despite how weird and insignificant they may appear. Kom has always had a knack for a catchy, poppy chorus, and it’s on full view here.
Peddle’s violin comes to the fore on the jumpy country of Duck Vs Decorated Shed, a song that feels kinda throwaway until you realise Kom is singing about radical postmodern architecture. It’s also the first of three consecutive songs about birds. The next, Birds of Australia, is a tender duet about loss and beauty and Kom’s old nemesis, nostalgia, complete with various recordings of birds. Its brutally funny pay-off makes us examine the unhealthy relationship we have with the planet’s non-human life. Strange Paradise imagines a bird as the final living creature on the planet with any memory of humans, and the fraught, itchy outro provides the strongest sonic pointer towards the album’s apocalyptic themes. The title track, which closes out the album, harnesses a deceptively gentle cosmic country to bid a fond farewell to the world.
Ghost Palace is, in many ways, a typical Burning Hell album for all the reasons that have already been mentioned: the wit and the wisdom, the variety and the bonhomie. But it’s possibly their most densely layered work so far. On the one hand, it sounds like the work of a songwriter who has made peace with his and his planet’s fate, but on the other, there are subtle signs that life may still be worth fighting for, that the kind of utopian camaraderie Kom sings about on Brazil Nuts and Blue Curacao may still be achievable. And in a way, the diversity that artists like Kom bring to the world is one of the things that make its future worth fighting for.
Ghost Palace (7th March 2025) BB*Island / You’ve Changed Records
Bandcamp: https://theburninghell.bandcamp.com/album/ghost-palace
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