Ghost Stories

Ghost Stories is the fourth studio album by the Los Angeles-based alternative rock band The Dream Syndicate. It was released in 1988, just a year before the band broke up. The album was re-released in 2004, with eight additional tracks recorded live for radio. Background The Dream Syndicate were dropped from A&M Records for disappointing sales after Medicine Show (1984), and broke up. They got back together to make Out of the Grey (1986) on Big Time Records, but the record company folded and the band retired again. Lead singer and songwriter Steve Wynn played solo for a bit before the band reformed with the help of a record deal with Enigma Records to make Ghost Stories, released in 1988 and produced by Elliot Mazer of Neil Young fame. Mazer, apparently, thought that conflict was a positive creative force and made Wynn work while sick, and even "intentionally angered" him. Reception The album's songs are "dominated by themes of reminiscence and mortality". Reactions to the album were mixed. Gene Gregorits, writing from the perspective of Wynn's later solo career, called the album "pneumatically morose" and "depressing". Denise Sullivan, writing for AllMusic, gave the album three stars out of five and called it a "very straight-ahead rock album". In 2004, however, when an expanded edition of the album was released on CD, Seattle's No Depression offered a glowing review of the "dense, desperate clang".