Along with the announcement of next week's digital release of Rob Morsberger's latest album Ghosts Before Breakfast, comes the shocking news that that the singer is suffering from brain cancer. "As I was finishing off my record," he says,"I unexpectedly received a diagnosis of grade 4 Glioblatoma. . .the worst manifestation of the most malignant kind of brain cancer. This is not a survivable illness." Given this kind of tragic news, a critical review of the album might seem like a gratuitous exercise. That is not the case, not for the artist. For the artist life goes on as long as the art goes on. And If Morsberger is anything, he is an artist. If his last album, the intellectually challenging Chronicle of a Literal Man, didn't prove that, this latest can't help but do the job.
Ghosts Before Breakfast welds the patented density of Morsberger's allusive lyrics and subject matter to a variety of musical styles both within and between songs. These are songs that will keep listeners humming along as they puzzle over meanings. This is true art, and the real thing is never easy. There are eleven songs on the album, and the more you listen, the more you recognize there isn't a loser in the bunch.
The title song, which opens the album, was written as a score for a 1927 silent film of the same name by Hans Richter, a Dada artist and abstract filmmaker. The chorus is made up from titles of some of Richter's other films, and most of the rest of the song reels off lists of images associated with abstract art. "The song," Morsberger says, "is really about making art, and being an artist." This is followed by "The Great Whatever," a song that rants against a god that allows a world of suffering with a Latin beat. Images like the wizard behind the curtain, the terrorist who looks to god for instruction, the watchmaker whose watch has gone wrong, fill the song, but despite all the negativity some sort of spiritual practice is necessary. "The Distinguished Thing" is a celebration of the novelist Henry James who died lamenting that there were still so many stories left untold, a lament that must cut close to home.
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