There’s something absolutely chilling about Nerisah’s “East Ghost” (a song that’s all about atmosphere, feeling and the memories that just won’t go away). It’s all about the atmosphere and the emotion, built on a bed of echoey guitars, ethereal vocals and a very disturbingly beautiful melody. It’s an alt rock song but it’s given a rather unusual instrumental treatment with cowbells and tambourines rather than a traditional drum kit to create a very odd, unpredictable rhythmic feel. It’s not a song that’s going to have a massive production or a big, explosive chorus. It just allows the melody and the textures to slowly draw you in and you end up in a very immersive world of tension and sadness.
The song is absolutely full of personal emotional resonance, talking about the wounds of war and how those memories can come back to haunt you when history starts to repeat itself. It’s very much inspired by Mersiha’s own experiences growing up in Bosnia and it’s the notion that some memories never really go away, they just stay down there, waiting for the world to remember them. That’s the essence of the song really. The vocal performance is very vulnerable and very uneasy at times and the instrumentation is quite atmospheric. The guitars are there, they add a lot of depth without being in the way at all and the percussion is quite unusual which gives the song a very hypnotic quality. “Some ghosts never leave, they just wait for the world to remember them.” That’s what gives it its character, it’s a very personal experience which becomes something that you can relate to on a much wider scale.
What’s so compelling about “East Ghost’ is the very fact that it’s not perfect musically. There’s a real sense of it being unpolished, organic. Everything in the recording has space to breathe. The guitars, the atmosphere, the subtle percussion all interact in a way that gives it a very distinct character. Nerisah clearly know how to use mood and restraint as effectively as they do volume and intensity. It’s a genuinely unsettling piece of alternative rock, a very atmospheric piece that doesn’t just tell you about ghosts of the past, it makes you feel them.
“Some ghosts never leave; they simply wait for the world to remember them.”