Blue Ghost Blues Album

The blues has grown up a lot in the last ten years, since guitarist
Andrew Burnes left New York for Georgia, bringing a de facto end to the
powerful abstract blues of Haunted House. In the time since, a new
generation — sometimes referred to as Freak Folk or New Weird America
and spearheaded by Tom Carter*, Jack Rose and Ben Chasny — has followed
in the footsteps of Loren Connors, John Fahey and a handful of others
who have long maintained that the blues is something more than 12 bars
and a backbeat.
After the demise of Haunted House, Connors continued preaching the
gospel, often with his wife — the enigmatic singer Suzanne Langille — to
anyone who would listen, playing a slow, distorted, reverb-drenched
blues as slowly the world began to come around. Then, in the summer of
2010, the stars aligned just so: Burnes was in town for a few days,
percussionist Neel Murgai was available, and the Brooklyn’s Issue
Project Room was booking matinee concerts in their courtyard. The band
had only existed for a brief two years and had been absent for a decade,
but they picked up right where they left off with only a brief
soundcheck as rehearsal. Another matter of months, and they were in the
studio, recording at long last the follow-up to their 1999 Erstwhile
release Up in Flames.
Looking back, maybe it isn’t that the blues has grown up. Maybe it
has reverted to its youth. After all, John Lee Hooker, Son House and
Mississippi Fred McDowell weren’t beholden to any 12-bar fixity. Nor was
Lonnie Johnson, whose song “Haunted House” gave the band its name. They
all played it how they felt it. It wasn’t until the 1960s and the
British blues revival (its champion, ironically perhaps, being Connors’
beloved Eric Clapton) that the blues was codified into its current
formula.
Haunted House is an unusual band. With Indian hand percussion and no
bass, they don’t look like a blues band — and maybe they’re not. But
they play it how they feel it. What more could you ask for?
* Check Carter and Marc Orleans’ Northern Spy release Eleven Twenty-Nine.