Experimental singer songwriter Lewis Mckale bursts onto our radar with deep and eerie new album, Ghost At The Feast.

By Graeme Smith

Feature photo by Chris Newman

Lewis Mckale has never featured on these pages before but I strongly suspect he will again if his new nine track album is anything to go by.

The singer songwriter grew up with the likes of The Beatles and David Bowie before embracing Radiohead and The Cure as a teenager. It was the music of Frank Turner and Billy Bragg that convinced him to give it a go as a solo artist. He started writing music in 2011 while based in Brighton, releasing his debut EP, My Father’s Son, in the same year. He’s been releasing music ever since.

His new album has an experimental feel, not least because it’s partly played on instruments that Lewis built himself, and tackles themes such as the afterlife, anxiety, reputation, and feeling like a ghost in the modern world.

Beware of the Dark gets us going in atmospheric style thanks to its eerie, stripped-back composition. Lewis’s vocals are instantly striking during this haunting vignette. It bleeds nicely into the rumbling rock and roll and overlapping vocals of Point of No Return. Happy as a Skeleton‘s combination of jauntiness and macabre storytelling makes it an early highlight.

Other highlights include the short, lively and paranoid Bad News, the echoing Spaghetti Western soundtrack of Friend of a Friend of a Friend, the soulful, image-laden The Lighthouse and vaudevillian album closer, When the Music Stops.

Lewis’s new album is one of the most eclectic I’ve heard, but he makes it work thanks to his unique style and inimitable charm. Hallowe’en might have come and gone, but if you’re not ready to move on from it, then this album is the perfect soundtrack.

Ghost At The Feast was recorded at Lewis’s home in Ponferrada, Spain. It was mixed and mastered by Tim Holhouse and features contributions from Barry Dolan and Mike Garrett. The album is out now via Aaahh!!! Real Records and you can give it a listen below.