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Ghosts in a Burning City is a strong, if slightly flawed, debut that manages to incorporate a great many powerful influences without ever being overwhelmed by them. There's enough variety here to see that Red State Soundsystem has room to grow as a project, and it will be interesting to see how (or if) Ellis can push past his New Wave-inspired textures into his own Moment.

I think that the world we’ve built for ourselves — the post-WWII globalist civilization — cannot sustain itself. This world is slowly ending. You see it every day and so do I. But I no longer believe that necessarily leads to horror and anarchy. People seem to be waking up, to be realizing that it’s possible to have less and still be okay. It’s slow, but I think it’s happening.

True to its title, the latest from Red State Soundsystem is both haunting and urbane, populated by fallen homecoming queens and the kind of dislocated characters who've come untethered from their very reason for being.

The act of taking things into one's own hands may be the present and future of so much music-making, and yet "DIY" still seems a limp term for what Red State Soundsystem principle Joshua Ellis has recently taken on. For his late-2009-released full-length, Ghosts in a Burning City, the musician/writer/designer (and former CityLife contributor) has tackled the tasks of composing, lyric-writing, playing, recording, producing, mixing, mastering, graphic designing, marketing, promoting, distributing and accounting in more or less that order. A cash-saving strategy? Absolutely, but even if the DIY-extreme approach weren't cutting his outsourcing costs, he still wouldn't have it any other way.

I mean, hell, it seems odd to me that people have relationships with this music. I’m the sort of person that assumes that nobody’s really paying attention to what I do. Which is what’s cool about releasing this album - the response has been really great from long-standing fans and new fans alike.

t's a rare kind of release for this town, emo-pensive as you'd ever want, yet subtle and groove-based enough (as on "Scarecrow" -- think Peter Gabriel under the influence of Thom Yorke's The Eraser) to offset it. Repeated listens are advised and profitable.

As the West's happy facade falls, Ghosts is the proper soundtrack.

“The telephone rings in the dark/You say, ‘Hey, I’m at the White Cross on Las Vegas Boulevard.’” It might be the coolest Vegas insider’s reference since Joe Kendall went Larry’s Great Western Meats on us on four years ago on Whiskey Flats.