Spectre – Lonesome Gambler Review

Lonesome Gambler is the rather delightful, fun, and deceptively breezy debut EP from Tasmania’s own Spectre. The vision of one Will Spectre of The Wizar’d and Tarot fame, it should come as little surprise to anyone remotely familiar with those bands that Spectre also, you know, rules in a not too similar way.

Spectre, the band, is equal parts late 1970s and early 1980s heavy metal and hard rock. The EP’s four songs all top out at around five minutes, sound distinctive, and feel genuinely dated in the best possible way, like a hard rock Pagan Altar with a slight prog influence. The production, too, has that perfect layer of cozy.

“Hero of the Illusion” kicks things off in addictive fashion. One of the riffier songs on an admittedly quite hooky and guitar-heavy EP, the track threads in the thinnest layer of psych. But to my personal enjoyment it is mostly content with maintaining a pleasant pace without too many bells and whistles, save for the cool synth bits at about 1:40 and the extended soloing just past the three-minute mark.

“Wolfbane” feel a bit like a kick in the pants, upping the urgency factor and leaning more toward heavy metal than early hard rock. Though perhaps more repetitive than the other three songs, there’s a memorability factor here that the others lack, at least to this degree. The relative simplicity of “Wolfbane” is a double-edged sword, but given the number of times I’ve now listened to it the song has clearly clicked in some form or fashion. The chorus speaks to me, what can I say?

The title track, “Lonesome Gambler” ushers in the EP’s second half. By now, you—the listener—have come to terms with Spectre’s aesthetic. This song doesn’t veer far from that established sound, but it does feel slightly groovier, danceable. This might be the weakest of the four stellar songs here.

Finally, “Turning the Wheel,” the Spectre song I like most. An awesome mid-1980s movie synth. Gentle strumming. A cool kind of effortlessness. By design, this song can’t fail. And put simply, it doesn’t.

Spectre—consider your audience targeted. I can’t imagine anyone who is into The Wizar’d or Tarot not liking all of what the band is offering here on its first EP. I’ll reserve a more complete judgment for a full-length, but for now, I am more than intrigued.