Synth Single Review: “Haunted” by Love Spirals Downwards

by Karl Magi

Love Spirals Downwards’ “Haunted” creates a misty atmosphere combining gentleness and the pain of loss and distance as it is shaped by subtle percussion while Ryan Lum’s guitar playing evokes all of the loneliness of midnight thought. 

Anji Lum’s voice falls like velvet across the music, echoing with spectral affection, as she captures the broken sensations slipping from the words. Ryan Lum’s guitar adds delicate radiance as it entangles with the gliding underlayer and the vocals breathe with all of the bereft emotion within the lyrics. 

The entire background is veiled in foggy contemplation as Anji Lum touches me with her vulnerable, ghostly voice before Ryan Lum plays a solo full of tentative touches and hurting feelings as the rhythm lightly brushes the music. As the song draws to a close, an unending ache fades into silence.

As she grows tired of seeing the song subject’s ghost at the foot of her bed and hearing "your voice rattling around in my head," our storyteller is haunted by the memory of the other person and there's "nothing more I can do.”

The narrator’s also exhausted by "counting the days that we've been apart" and feeling the other person's loss "like a hole in my heart." The spectral presence of what came before haunts her even though it's "naught but a shadow trailing across the floor." As her memory flickers, she points out that everything that is left is nothing more than a ghost.