Time to start with an inflammatory statement. Lord of the Lost’s Opvs Noir Vol. 1 is not perfect by any means, but it’s the album that genre luminaries Ghost should have released this year, instead of the one we got.
Backtracking a little bit - for those who don’t know, Opvs Noir is to be a trilogy of albums from Lord of the Lost, which as a concept is a little dubious (how can they, or anybody, possibly have three quality albums of material ready at hand?) but if this first installment is to be the launch point, then the subsequent two releases (release dates unknown as of this writing,) should at least merit attention.
Lord of the Lost has long been a singles band. Each of their albums has a couple of satisfying earworm bangers on it, but they also have a history of stocking their albums with dramatic borderline ballads, as fits their idiom, so it can be a tiresome exercise to find the wheat amidst the chaff.
The band’s previous album, Blood & Glitter, did a lot to correct that trend, by writing an album full of bopping sing-alongs and cutting back on the number of purely dramatic pieces (which makes the sublimely excellent “One Last Song” resonate even more.) Now for this new record, it’s come to the point where the bombastic, over-the-top songwriting of the band’s younger years has been paired with the pacing lessons learned from the previous record, to produce an effort that is solid both in breadth and scope. The band delivers a versatile experience of both down-and-dirty metal chugging and easy to digest, passionate choruses. You know, like Ghost should have.
Not to mention that the songwriting on Opvs Noir Vol. 1 has also become more dynamic and varied. Skip all the way down to “The Things We Do For Love,” and suddenly Lord of the Lost is writing a Combichrist song, but interspersed with the kind of high drama that Lord of the Lost is so accomplished with. Could the blending of these two things been a little smoother? Yeah, the song kind of sounds like two songs in one, but the juxtaposition of the two pieces is so entertaining that it works anyway.
What we see from Lord of the Lost that’s hard to say they’ve displayed previously is a sense of real ferocity. There’s a lot of destructive potential in the riffs on this album, as evidenced both by what the band is playing and the sheer volume and distortion of it. Past the mid-point of the record (more on this in a minute,) beginning with “Ghosts,” the riffs bite with a savagery that is uncommon for Lord of the Lost, and it adds a new and appreciably dire dimension to the band’s typically more accessible fare.
There’s a sense that even with this being the first album in a trilogy, that this new record is two albums in one, and the first half is the weaker of the two. Four of the first six songs test the waters of what’s in the second half, but they feel a little more wallpaper, especially in conjunction with what comes after. Only “I Will Die In It,” which sounds almost like a righteously angry song from a musical, and “Moonstruck,” really hit a chord (no pun intended) of something more substantive and of greater promise.
It is worth mentioning that Opvs Noir Vol. 1 is peppered with guest appearances, from the influential (Feuerschwanz, Tina Guo,) to the shrug-inducing (Within Temptation.) This gives a possible window into how three albums of material in succession may be possible - by incorporating many other artists into the creative process and making the trilogy more of a collaborative work, under the single banner of Lord of the Lost.
Either way, Opvs Noir Vol. 1 is a quality jumping-off point for a musical project that is ambitious in scope. Just make sure to listen to the whole thing, and not get stuck in the first half. Fingers crossed that it can keep the momentum going through parts 2 and 3.
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