Band:	Drug Honkey
Album:	Ghost In The Fire
Release date:	January 2012

01. Order Of The Solar Temple
02. Ghost In The Fire
03. Weight Of The World [feat. Blake Judd]
04. This Time I Won't Hesitate
05. In Black Robe
06. Dead Days (Heroin III)
07. Five Years Up
08. Out Of My Mind
09. Twitcher [Scorn cover]
10. Saturate/Annihilate


Drug Honkey's lawyers had enough foresight to warn me that Drug Honkey will NOT be held responsible for the resulting paranoid schizophrenic episodes one will probably suffer when listening to Ghost In The Fire (particularly through headphones). They told me that because of the considerable power I have over the goings-on in the metal webzine world, but everyone should be given that warning before throwing this album on. It's like a group of renown hypnotist-musicians teamed up to jam out an album to turn everyone into Richard Chase. It's droning, dissonant, diabolical, doomed-out psychedelia dripping with LSD and blood; the word "trippy" won't quite suffice for what these guys have done this time around.

It's not the kind of metal I'm keen to put on. You're not going to want to knock down a few beers and bang your head into things to it. It's best listened to with a gram of DMT, alone in an abandoned nursing home. Or with a few syrettes of that Army-surplus morphine Cole Phelps' old subordinates stole—again, alone--in an old Chinese sex-traffic tunnel somewhere in Portland. It's dark, sordid, melancholy queasiness condensed into sonic form.

And, yeah, it's disturbingly ugly—like, having Ron Perlman's face crawl around in your ears, disturbingly ugly. But it's all deformed and grisly in a captivating way. Despite its number of drawbacks and moments that made me want to quit listening prematurely, it's enjoyable. Tracks might not really ever build-up to anything satisfying or dramatic, and riffs may never give you much to hold on to, but the textures of the tunes (thanks to a class-A production job) are near perfect. Despite being babbling and crazy most of the time, Ghost provides enough entrancing, buzzing, and pounding sounds (not tunes) to be fully bitten into and enjoyed.

Overall through, Thryce had it spot-on about their previous release and it still applies here: "if you're paranoid, listening to this album may cause motion sickness to the naked man standing right behind you." That's really all you can hope to know for sure before jumping into this grand old mindfuck here.