Snow Ghosts: A Wrecking

Hannah Cartwright and Ross Tones are now joined by multi-instrumentalist Oliver Knowles to help make Snow Ghosts’s sophomore album A Wrecking a more abstract one. The resulting sounds do run the gamut from the silky-smooth washes normally found in trip hop and shoegaze music to bursts of noisy surprise that will punctuate a mostly instrumental song. Tones and Knowles waste little time in getting there too, starting “Held the Light”, the second track, with a nice industrial screech.

Snow Ghosts’s first album was called A Small Murmuration, and Hannah Cartwright’s vocals don’t sound like they aspire to be much more than that. Repetitive, heavily-processed, and making a noticeable effort for spooky points, it keeps the rest of the album from making a unique impression. A Wrecking is a fine idea that got bogged down on the way to realization.