Dead Man’s Bones – Dead Man’s Bones

It’s amazing the things you find out when you start digging into a band’s history. I heard of Dead Man’s Bones just before Christmas when a friend heard me listening to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes and suggested that I might like them. I hopped on the Gshark and found them there, which allowed me to listen away to my heart’s content. They were pretty high on my list of new things I liked, and so, I decided that today I’d find out all about them and let ya’ll know what the scoop was. To my shock, I discovered that Dead Man’s Bones are the musical vehicle of the actor Ryan Gosling, who stole all out hearts in Lars and The Real Girl. Unbelievable right?

Big name actors with bands can be risky business: we’ve all seen or heard of the train-wreck that is the Jared Leto-fronted 30 Seconds To Mars, and for music fans, Zooey Deschanel‘s over-hyped venture She and Him represents exactly why actors should not be allowed form bands. Lastly, who could forget the classic Keanu Reeves debacle, Dogstar. So you can understand how I might be genuinely shocked to find that Gosling was the driving force behind Dead Man’s Bones, given how good a record I think this is.

The eponymous album begins with a Trail of Dead style introduction, all crazy noises and an eerie woman speaking. There’s a sparseness to the opener, Dead Hearts, that allows for a building, sweeping sound that is quite typical of the big-band indie we’ve heard over the past number of years from the likes of Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene: incidentally, I’ve never been a big fan of those two, so it won’t necessarily follow that if you like them you’ll like this. Dead Man’s Bones have more of a sinister feeling running through their sound, and I think that’s what has me hooked. The music sounds delightful at points, but the underlying menace that is prevalent on pretty much every track on this record speaks to the haunted, tortured artist buried within. To phrase that a little less pretentiously, Ryan Gosling has a creepy mind.

One of my favourite bands of the last decade was The Coral, and with In The Room Where You Sleep, Dead Man’s Bones draw from their playbook expertly. The classic Byrds-style keyboard sound combined with an up-tempo rhythm and gratuitous hand-clapping gives an otherworldly feel to the song, and Gosling’s vocals compliment that feeling nicely as he plumbs the depths of his larynx to find his inner Nick Cave. Buried in Water returns to the sparse, creepy, almost classical in some respects, style of earlier, but this time steps it up with a contribution from the Silverlake Conservatory Children’s Choir. For added spine-tingling value there’s a constant backdrop of children’s whistling throughout: it’s spooky enough to have those tiny little hairs on my forearms standing on end every time I hear it.

The crowd-pleaser, and the song that sucked me in when I first heard this band, is My Body’s A Zombie For You. How anyone could not like a song with as amazing a title as that is beyond me, but it’s much more than just a one-liner. This track is to Dead Man’s Bones what Home was to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes. It has that earworm capability: it hangs around in the back of your mind to reappear as a whistled ditty while waiting on the train, or a repeated refrain to be belted out in the shower. Pa Pa Power features the choir heavily again, and chugs along like a little engine that definitely can: the simplistic keyboard motif complemented expertly by the huge refrain of “we won’t destroy you, no we will not destroy you.”

Young & Tragic is about as simple as it gets on this record: short, sweet, and very much to the point. The choral input is again well used, and the overlying strange sounds and whispers that punctuate the guitars and keyboards only serve to add to the sense of triumphant hopefulness and happy regret that permeates this song. Paper Ships tells a doo-wop story of a ghost ship, and its jaunty rhythm and upbeat melody belie the fact that at heart, it’s a sad song, but that’s the beauty of doo-wop. This tragic little tale is one of my favourites off the record, something about it just pushes my buttons: it’s one of those intangibles that it’s always impossible to find the words for when you try, just trust me when I say, if you listen to this one, you’ll get a smile on your face to match the tear in your eye.

Lose Your Soul heralds the return of the menace: haunting handclaps, the children’s chorus in full effect, and thumping bassline, and a very Bad Seeds-style all round combine to forge an altogether more rocking sound than we’ve had so far on the record. This one will have you dancing round your living room, before the slow interlude gets you practicing your best plié. Gosling actually sounds a lot like Chris Rea on this track to my ears, but that might be because I think anyone who sings with enough bass in their voice sounds like Chris Rea. A beautiful lament follows, titled Werewolf Heart; a love story between a ghost and a monster, which incidentally was the theme of the play that Gosling and his partner Zach Shields originally wrote this album as the score for: the more you know.

Dead Man’s Bones is the penultimate song on Dead Man’s Bones by Dead Man’s Bones: the eponymousity of it all. We come back to the similarities with The Coral here, especially their concept record, Nightfreak and the Sons of Becker. Flowers Grow Out Of My Grave closes the album in a way I love. Just at the start there’s a tiny little throwback to My Body’s A Zombie For You, that kind of symmetry in a record drives me wild, seriously, like more than anything else. The refrain of the final song is as hauntingly beautiful as is fitting for this record and closes the record perfectly.

I’d listened to this record a whole mess of times before I decided to write about it, and had commented loud and often to anyone who’d listen about how complete I thought it sounded. That’s to be expected now though, I suppose, given that I’m now aware of it’s original conception as a score to back a story. The whole thing flows wonderfully, hitting its heights and breaching its depths at points that feel appropriate and welcome. Gosling and Shields were rigorous in the writing and yet, chose a freer path in the recording, choosing to play every instrument themselves, even those they’d never played before, and setting a three-take maximum in order to allow rawness and inconsistencies add to the production value. The addition of the school choir was an inspired touch, as they used it so well. I’ve heard albums where choirs have been used inexpertly, and that can really be terrible, but they put them in where they were needed most and didn’t overdo, and I think that’s the key.

To conclude, Dead Man’s Bones have produced a remarkable, fresh sounding record out of simple components. There’s nothing overly flash, nothing too complicated, just good solid songwriting, creepy sounds and judicious production that all point toward a common theme. If only more albums were made with those tenets in mind, I might like more new bands. The record was released on ANTI Records last October so it might be available in your local store if they’re like mad cool or whatever. Here in Dublin I’ve told Road Records to order it in, so you should do the same: that way we might get some kind of bulk discount. Until then, here’s a cool video of them in action.