Cloud Cult – Feel Good Ghosts

Craig Minowa, the singer and songwriter of Cloud Cult, seems to have invested significant time seeking his own sources for life’s inspirations, and having found them, decided to share his discoveries. Energetic, passionate, and borrowing from several musical genres, Feel Good Ghosts voices a reconciliation with the past and the results of a journey to the present.

Attaching Cloud Cult to the recent cultural trend toward popular media providing inspiration and positive self-improvement, Minowa has crafted lyrics that could read like a poetic self-help book. Pulling together greater forces including reincarnation in nature, ever-present ghosts, and exploratory heart-surgeon angels, this album carries the weight of the harshness of life and the inevitable human aptitude to find hope in the primal beauty of living. Religious or not, listeners are bound to locate morsels of fresh perspectives on how to motivate themselves to some sort of self-fulfillment, even if it’s simply a new paradigm for how to deal with an emotionally straining situation.

On the band’s website, each membe has posted a personal statement and biography. Minowa’s wife, Connie, who is a visual painter during their performances, reveals that they lost a little boy in 2002, the pain of which appears to be the central inspiration for many of the album’s lyrics. Cloud Cult defines the tone of the album’s message with the opening lyrics of the first track, “No One Said It Would Be Easy.”

“When you came up from the ground/ From a million little pieces/ You’re a pretty human being/ Yeah, you’re a pretty human being, oh. When it all comes crashing down/ You try to understand your meaning/ No one said it would be easy/ This living, it ain’t easy, oh….”

Every song on this album aims for something higher, a grand motivational scheme that includes warm instrumentals, catchy folk rhythms, electronic voice manipulations, bits of sampled voice recordings, and nearly always an infectious beat.

There are a few moments when Cloud Cult loses their orchestral grace, where I think they pull me out of the spell they’ve spent so much time weaving. For example, in “Hurricane and Survival Guide,” while the rhythms are perfectly engaging, and the message positive and survivalist, their replacement of the more mature “shit” with “poop” left me wondering… did they really just say “poop”?

“I’ve had enough of hiding underneath my covers, I’m done with all that poop that brings me down, down, down…. I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired, I will laugh my way through hurricanes and fire, that’s why you don’t wanna bring me down.”

Another moment within in the third track sounds like they’ve added one of Alvin’s Chipmunks to the track, and only the Lord (and possibly Cloud Cult) knows what it’s saying.

If the album has weak places, it would be found within this collection as a whole, rather than within the individual songs. Based on this album alone, the stylistic changes between each song is enough to make you wonder how, exactly, this band defines itself. The energy, though, flows throughout, and the lyrics weave a common thematic thread from beginning to end.

Within the fourth track (their most stirring and epic song on this album), “When Water Comes to Life,” we learn that “all you need to know, is you are made of water…”

“And when the angels come, they’ll cut you down the middle, to see if you’re still there, to see if you’re still there. And underneath your ribs, they’ll find a heart-shaped locket, an old photograph, of you in daddy’s arms. And then they’ll sew you closed and give you back to the water, from where we’re all born. And you’ll feed the ghosts and you’ll feed the living, you’ll be a stranger, and you’ll be a friend….”

Listening to these lyrics combined with the track’s swelling orchestration is guaranteed to achieve what Cloud Cult has been seeking to do all along – to move some little piece inside of you to find sentiment and beauty from this grand thing we call life.

Related posts:

1. Stars – The Five Ghosts
2. Water and Bodies – Water and Bodies EP
3. Sea Wolf – White Water, White Bloom

Tagged as: Experimental Rock, Indie Rock, minneapolis

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