Outside In(fluence): In Love With a Ghost - "gay story"

I recently discovered a French artist named In Love With A Ghost. They have been making lo-fi electronic musick for a few years now. A lot of these tracks seem to fall into chillwave or chiptune and things like that. It reminds me of Slime Girls or Boards of Canada. On April 1st, In Love With A Ghost released gay story. I thought it was really interesting, so I'm gonna tell you all about it.

The cover art has some witchy teens smoking on a cloud. This image is displayed in glorius sketchy lines and poofy colors. It's almost comforting looking, but the smoking and the big eyes give it a small edge. I like the colors used and the pointy yellow hat.

The first track on gay story is "iced tea for breakfast", which starts with a phaser sound and continues into rain and a light melody. I can hear little animals and things in the background, frogs and birds and things. Lonely echoes swim thru the song as well as little bleeps and bloops. It really paints a picture. "happy when you're not here" really sounds like some Final Fantasy or Chrono Cross stuff. The drums that kick in change it up a bit. It's just a timeless type of song. It could potentially be a hip-hop beat. "feeling empty inside because there's no more spaghetti" has the same kind of tone, but this one has some shy whistling and handclaps. It's a charming song that I wish went on for a bit longer.

"something easy" features another artist named mommy. This has a cool beat with a snappy reverb, tinkling metal objects, and a little chiptune melody. It's very beautiful. "popstar love" might be a reference to the Kirby games. It has more rain sounds channeling into a Boards of Canada sound with the kind of song you might here in the aforementioned games. There's a lot going on with this one, especially for how short it is. You can here little laser sounds, more whistling, cymbals, and weird crunchy things. The track really has a dreamlike quality with the production, though that's true of all of these really. This one seems to do it the most. "hyacinth" features mommy again. The first half doesn't stand out too much, but I really like it once the beats and whistles come in. I love that the whistling is imperfect; the breath is not consistent and the tone seems slightly off at times. The final track is "thinking about u (jk)". This one has a much different tone than the others; it doesn't start with the rain/water, though that does appear later, and the production just seems a bit different. There are sounds of bats and birds. The main melody has a really awesome sound, some kind of chorus maybe. "thinking about u (jk)" would be a great ending song to a film or video game.

gay story is a quiet little album. It sounds a lot like the musick from Chrono Trigger and other SNES-era Japanese RPGs. I really like it. It's not some high-energy rock thing; it's comforting and introspective and small. I enjoyed the varied sounds presented, and I like the short song lengths. I keep wanting to say like, "I wish there was more variance in the songs or longer tracks," but I think gay story works excellently as it is. It's very conceptual and put together. It's a small world, a little street with a water coming down, a person drinking tea and looking out a window at small animals playing in the water. gay story receives a Good.