Review Summary: All style, no substance.
I’m somewhat out of the loop with John 5’s solo output these days. I still glance at where his career is going, simply because his presence bleeds into a lot of the music and scenes I’m interested in, but there was a time when I was pretty obsessed with what he was doing in both Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie, as well as his interesting solo records. The body of John’s work, from his 2004 debut LP
Vertigo right through to 2012’s
God Told Me To, is a ferociously entertaining mixture of styles and genres that not only reveals the gamut of his omnipotent technical prowess, but his ability to emote and use the guitar as a voice with lasting resonance. It’s the latter quality during this time period that made his albums stand out from what is, typically, a rather mundane concept – a venerable virtuoso hellbent on showcasing 40 minutes of shredding, while bafflingly superseding the basic fundamentals of what any listener wants in their music: interesting songwriting. And you know what, that eight-year stint of albums not only helped get his reputation out there as a powerhouse player (rather than a one-trick industrial metal guitar player), it displayed a genuinely entertaining era that avoided the “virtuoso album” caveats, blending interesting melodies with virtuosic playing, with
The Art of Malice and
God Told Me To, it seems, being the apotheosis of his creative endeavours.
Unfortunately for John 5, anything I’ve listened to after
God Told Me To – with the exception of
Season of the Witch – falls prey to the very problems I credited his 2004-2012 albums for avoiding. Even with John’s skillset, his extensive catalogue and unwillingness to shake up the formula is, by mathematical probability, going to get him stuck in a place that detrimentally recycles ideas, and for
Careful with that Axe, that’s exactly where we see that stiff, stale structure taking form. Indeed,
Careful with that Axe is a flavourless, nondescript exercise that hears Lowery running through familiar patterns at the usual breakneck speeds, which is an issue in itself, but the real reason it falters so hard is because it conforms to the cardinal problems mentioned earlier: shredding over songwriting.
Season of the Witch internalises the issues its predecessor created and tries to course correct in the right direction, but that album feels like an anomaly as
Invasion slots right back into the same problems
Careful with that Axe was plagued with. After only being able to get halfway through
Invasion, I gave up on John 5’s solo albums, avoiding
Sinner entirely. However, after John recently went on Billy Corgan’s podcast (which I fully recommend), I thought I’d dive into John 5’s eleventh album,
Ghost, just to see if things have picked up.
After six years away from Lowery’s work, does
Ghost overcome the long-standing hump or does it continue to follow the status quo? Regrettably, it seems to lean into the latter, as very little has changed. The positive is that it’s mercifully short, sitting at just under thirty minutes, but in terms of what
Ghost provides, it’s still operating under the same sterile production and John 5’s habitual shredding patterns. It goes without saying his proficiency is formidable, but given that he’s only human, muscle memory prevails, and so a lot of the stuff you hear on here has been done many times before. “Deviant” and “Strung Out” are so uninspiring they got an eye-roll from me when they first kicked in, and unfortunately things don’t get much better after that. Everything on
Ghost simply apes the same stuff 5 has been peddling for the last decade now, to the point where it’s predictable and soporific. There’s a couple of okay moments on here, like the hair metal flavoured “Fiend”, the jazz-y “Moon Glow”, and the atmospheric album closer “Executioner”, but overall, this thing falls pretty flat considering who’s behind the wheel. At this point John 5 has proven what he’s capable of doing on a technical level, but I feel there’s still a lot of potential in future solo records, if he refocuses those efforts onto melody, atmosphere, and songwriting, rather than how many notes he can get into a song, because the tank is well and truly empty with this format.
