The Ghost Who Walks is an album title that could double as a physical description of its creator. Karen Elson is a spectral beauty, all translucent skin and shock of Tabasco-red hair. As an international model, her looks have, thus far, been her career. However, life in Nashville – where she’s established a marital home with her old man, Jack White – seems to have had a profound influence on the Oldham-born lass.
Not that Elson’s stopped playing dress-up you understand. Here, we find her kitted out in the garb of a Southern Gothic songstress, her debut veering from the old-timey country of ‘Stolen Roses’ to contemporary Americana, ‘Garden’, and onto spooky cabaret, ‘100 Years From Now’. The whole thing swelters with passion and shivers with dread. It opens with the ominous title track, a murder ballad in the style of The Handsome Family. There is menace too in ‘The Truth Is In The Dirt’, guitar twanging deliciously as it introduces its femme fatale: “Here she comes, it’s killing time/ Flames are burning behind her eyes”.
As tradition dictates, the heart is a lonely hunter in these lands. ‘Pretty Babies’, ‘The Birds They Circle’ and the wonky jive of ‘Cruel Summer’ all damn love as a cruel deceit. However, just occasionally – as on delicately-strummed lullaby ‘The Last Laugh’ – there is tenderness. Throughout, hubby/producer Jack keeps a careful hand on the tiller, ensuring authenticity and providing a darker echo of his work with country music matriarch Loretta Lynn on 2004’s Van Lear Rose. As striking as its supermodel maker, The Ghost Who Walks is so much more than a mere vanity project.