Ghosts, the third album from the young Minneapolis band One For The Team, is part break-up record, loaded with all the recriminations that term connotes, and part escapist fantasy about befriending a ghost. It’s a bittersweet pairing: Having a spirit pal to kick around with helps allay the sting of heartbreak, but there are somber parallels between the protagonist and his ghost. One roams a planet he no longer belongs to, unable to move on to the next world, while the other watches his ex from a far, equally lost, equally unable to move on.
“I want to talk to you so bad,” guitarist/songwriter Ian Anderson moans on “I Got Tamed,” dueting, as he often does, with keyboardist Grace Fiddler, a beguiling singer in her own right. It’s unclear whether he’s speaking for the man, the ghost or both.
Like all effective break-up albums, this one lands its share of blows to the gut, but it’s far from the downer its subject matter suggests. Recorded to analogue tape at John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone studio, it may be the liveliest, most vibrant breakup record since Tegan and Sara’s The Con, and like that album, this one glows with buoyant, uncontainable hooks. With their intertwined male/female leads and the tumultuous rumble of their fuzzed-out guitars, One For The Team can resemble the Silversun Pickups, but Ghosts is poppier than anything that group’s attempted; on a sheer hooks per minute ratio, it ranks up there with a New Pornographers album. Striking a potent balance between heaviness and hookiness, it's one of the year’s most pleasant surprises, a compulsively replayable break-up record with an inspired twist.
