Saturday 10.31.09: DEAD MAN’S BONES @ echo

deadmansbones

Some records are an absolute void of interesting review angles, forcing us critics to do, like, actual work. Dead Man’s Bones is not one of those records. Fact: Indie dreamboat and RealDoll lover portrayer Ryan Gosling is one-half of Los Angeles band Dead Man’s Bones. Wow! Fact: Dead Man’s Bones’ self-titled debut is a concept album vaguely about supernatural themes, released less than a month before Halloween! Gee! Fact: The vast majority of Dead Man’s Bones utilizes a real-life, full-on children’s choir, recruited from hipster kid academy the Silverlake Conservatory of Music. TILT TILT TILT! Step aside Girls, we’ve got a new backstory winner for 2009.

It’s a credit to the record then that none of these angles turn out to be easy nooses by which to hang the project. The one triggering most alarm bells, of course, is Gosling’s involvement, since everyone knows that movie-star bands tend to range from amateurishly terrible to inoffensively generic. Well, I’ll dispel that preconception straight away– Dead Man’s Bones is a really, really weird record, a project where the musical reference points at least indicate that Gosling and his co-conspirator Zach Shields have record collections that go deeper than an iPod nano.

The other two angles– spooky themes and a kid’s choir– are both symptoms of the record’s most endearing quality, a surplus of ideas and a willingness to combine them in ways that are vibrant, sloppy, and fun. Though the record begins with a pretentious spoken-word introductory track (kind of a necessary concept-album evil) followed by its worst song (the Ambien-overdosed and over-serious “Dead Hearts”), the remainder of the project is slapdash, giddy, and surprisingly dense. Like an old Elephant 6 record, Dead Man’s Bones has a lo-fi warts-and-all feel that’s less lazy aesthetic than charmingly handmade, even more charismatic for it’s unevenness. – Pitchfork