Questions in Dialect: The Ghost Wishes to Speak

Questions in Dialect try to win the listener over with roughly 17 minutes of music. However, starting things off with a slow, deliberate and rather mundane hockey arena-ish organ for the intro to “On This Hand” is certainly not a way to success. From there, the song really doesn’t soar, but is content in ‘70s era mediocrity. And unfortunately, the band doesn’t seem to move far from that pattern. “Thought Procession” sounds like a majestic, ambient landscape until you have certain blips and beeps which make one yearn for their Pong console. Fortunately, they nip this malaise in the bud with some jazzy percussion a third of the way into the song. But generally, tracks such as “Blank Staircase” are abstract pieces that might fit better on a Philip Glass album. Perhaps the only song which shows promise is “Train No Track” which winds around some nice piano work while a din of drums and keyboards swirl around it. “From A Cloud” rounds things off, but the only thing ethereal here is the cloud itself. Questions in Dialect do what they do well; it’s just that not too many would probably enjoy what they do.