RxGhost “Candles”

Kansas City shoegaze/Dangerpop Band RxGhost has released a video for “Candles” off their new album ‘Scaffolding.’

Frontman Josh Thomas says, “‘Candles’ is about how it’s important to still try to do interesting things and strive for change, even in a world where the super rich have rigged the system. If you keep up with public policy and government handouts, it’s hard to feel like the system isn’t rigged for the investment class. Conservatives act like poor people are welfare queens, while ignoring that the ultra wealthy get more handouts than anyone. The middle class is getting fucked by the ultra rich, and it’s been obvious for a long time. They have a system set up to get the left and right wing fighting each other, while quietly siphoning all the resources out of the system and hoarding it.

We could die at any time, like tea candles floating on an ocean, getting extinguished by random waves. This song is about how, even in this current reality, it’s important to try to do interesting things, even when the system is rigged against us. We won’t be here long, let’s do something interesting.”

Video director Matthew Dunehoo (@marychickensoup) explains, “With ‘Candles’ I was eager to embrace and flesh out the metaphor of the candle for the spirit, and the volatile experience of trying to keep it together while burning in spite of the elements. The pace of the song itself seems to always hover right before breaking apart, at the repeated mantra of the “main character” expressing the feeling of being frayed, stretched thin, flickering between stability and losing it when considering a ton of pointless routine shit.

I was thrilled to work with up and coming hyperpop artist DELARAY! who starred in the video. She knows all about crippling anxiety and struggling with substance use disorder, and self destructive impulses. It was easy to reach that moment, where battling anxiety she tries to go out and do the abysmal job search, and ultimately has to abort the mission as the surging anxiety inside makes her feel as if she’s drowning.

A hopeful glimpse at the end, a place that calms the nerves just looking at the planes departing from LAX, maybe portending her journey through the rat race, and her habituated hangups and mental struggles.

Josh Thomas has a new project called RxGhost. It features names familiar to those who remember Thomas’ projects High Diving Ponies and Spidermums – drummer Justin Brooks and guitarist James Capps – alongside bassist Chris Smead and multi-instrumentalist Jeremiah James, but RxGhost is something else entirely: a powerful example of what Thomas describes as the “weirdo shoegaze music” he’s made throughout his musical career, but the music is bigger, crisper, and cleaner, with that last descriptor applicable to Thomas himself, as well.

While many creatives have come out of the Covid-19 pandemic with new projects, one could say that RxGhost is the result of Josh Thomas making a project out of himself. Thomas was divorced, but living in the guest room of his house, working a horribly stressful job writing software with huge time crunches, while drinking way too much, taking opiates and speed to try to keep himself together.

“I was a mess, my voice was destroyed from chugging whiskey, freebasing occasionally, and all the bile from throwing up daily,” Thomas says of those dark days. “I was an absolute disaster.”

After Thomas returned home from a failed attempt at getting clean by living in an RV parked in his brother’s driveway, his ex-wife convinced him that he had to go to rehab if he was going to live.

“I didn’t want my kids to grow up without a dad, so I finally went in, mainly for that reason,” recalls Thomas. During his 60 days in there, however, he realized he had to get clean for himself, too.

“In rehab, I started writing a bunch again,” explains Thomas. “I had lots of songs that were half-finished from before I got clean. Once I was finally healthy enough to start having band practice, I was lucky that Justin and James were still willing to do it since I’d been so flaky for so many years.”

“Thomas and his collaborators hadn’t been able to play as a band for four or five years, but since, the band added Chris Smead on bass, Jeremiah James on bass VI, and Thomas is setting up a studio in the basement of his new house where they’ve already begun tracking the followup to Scaffolding.”

“It was like we’d never stopped playing,” Thomas recalls. “After the first practice or two, we were pretty much show-ready. We picked things up again really quickly. Chris was the only new guy and it wasn’t like we had to really explain anything to him or show him anything, he just figured out all the bass parts on his own and nailed it day one.”

RxGhost has thus far recorded 15 songs with Paul Malinowski at Massive Sound, but since those sessions started, Thomas has written six more cuts that might be better than any of those songs, he says. They still fall in line with the dangerpop and sorrowwave for which his past bands were known – there’s definitely distortion and sad lyrical content – but the reach of the melodies has been extended, and the lyrical content’s delivery is cathartic.

“I was worried that I couldn’t write sober, or that it wouldn’t be as interesting,” says Thomas. “If anything, it’s easier to write now, and far easier to remember later what I wrote.”

Thomas has started to make things less complicated, and he likes it better, says the musician: “I think I’m kind of over the idea of making the song structure overly complicated for no reason. Now when the structure and time signatures are weird, it’s because that’s how the song works best, and not me trying to make it strange just for strangeness’ sake.”

“I’m probably about as happy as I’ve ever been,” the musician enthuses. “Things feel fresh and exciting. It was rough last decade, but I feel more on top of my shit than I ever have.”

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