Album Review: The Shape of "Feel Good Ghosts"

It has been said that Cloud Cult’s album Feel Good Ghosts (Tea Partying Through Tornados) does not build—that is, does not reach a climax—overall, but if one considers it a concept album and listens to the lyrics as a complement to the music from start to finish, there is a noticeable progression, complete with crests and troughs. Through this lens, one may find that the fourth track, “When Water Comes to Life,” is the primary climax, for several reasons.

First and foremost, this song builds. It builds the way a dancer acquires energy, in breadth of movement, in meaning, in intensity. From the violin’s first minor intervals, positively soaked in emotion, through their delicate plucking sounds, the song demands your focus; it drives forward with undeniable momentum. The minute mark bursts forth with a glorious melody that delivers a feeling of arrival, but the song keeps building. It seems that in just this first minute and a half—technically and blasphemously called an intro—a whole story has been told, a whole life has been lived. When the vocals finally come in, Craig Minowa’s tender voice mirrors the pattern the instruments just established: he starts softly and passionately, which the strings and percussion imitate underneath.

At the top of this song’s peak, it is clear that it is the center of the album. “No One Said It Would Be Easy” opens with the claim that you are the vastly complex conglomerate of countless unfathomable worlds; “I Love You All” closes, simply, with the way lives end, maybe, with an “I love you.” “Water” sits right in the middle of the thirteen tracks, conceptually if not literally. “All you need to know,” Minowa (et al) sings, “is you were made of water. You were made of water.” Now, one may speculate, that is clearly not all you should know. With a brilliant touch of irony, Cloud Cult is demanding that their listeners assume the fairy cake (cf. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)—they are depending on you, their faithful and astute listener, to understand that if you know this one very important and central thing, you can extrapolate everything else you will ever need to know. Based on that aspect of human life, you have it in your power to determine the rest of creation.

What an epic statement to make! And with characteristic Cloud Cult-ian understatement, too. Also, what a sharp contrast from track one’s “You were sewn together with a tapestry of molecules, a billion baby galaxies and wide open spaces.” From that starting point, it would almost seem the “Water” is the nadir; having begun as the most complex creature imaginable, now we have been simplified to being the combination of two elements, with the inculcated insistence that that is all we need to know. But understanding the irony of such a statement—understanding that any comment on the nature of things from the human perspective is necessarily an understatement—inverts the trough, and thus “Water” is the summit of Feel Good Ghosts.

That is not to say, by any means, that the album declines after track four. Suffice it to say, though, as a parting thought from this brief overview, that taking the last song as the end of a progression implies that Cloud Cult has shifted their focus from the constitution of the human body to the essence of human life: love of family. It seems that Feel Good Ghosts has not “built” in the linear fashion we are used to. Instead, it has traced a speculation of our own existence, and at the end of it all, has decided that the rub is not what we are made of, but what we do.