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Aug 06, 2009 Dead Man’s Bones By Kyle Lemmon

On October 6th (just in time to soundtrack your Halloween party), Anti- will release the self-titled debut from Dead Man’s Bones, the collaboration between Los Angeles-based actors Ryan Gosling and Zach Shields. The Disney’s Haunted Mansion-inspired album (formerly titled Never Let a Lack of Talent Get You Down) was recorded with The Silverlake Conservatory Children’s Choir, an assemblage of L.A.-based youngsters ranging in age from five to 17. As you can see from the cover above, the choir will feature prominently on the release.

Alongside the songwriting pair’s love for doo-wop artists such as The Shangri-Las, Gosling and Shields were also separately spurred to create by two musical programs from their upbringings. Ghetto Reality (still in print through Smithsonian Global Sound) was a 60’s musical masterpiece conceived by Nancy Dupree. She was an inner-city school music teacher in Gosling’s hometown of Rochester, New York. Shields on the other hand, was raised in rural Canada, where Hans Fenger assembled 60 untrained children in 1976 and created The Langley Schools Music Project, Innocence and Despair, an ad hoc production that featured non-professionals singing the songs of The Beatles, The Beach Boys and David Bowie.

Following in step with their musical mentors, Gosling and Shields banded together their own untested group to help soundtrack their formerly abandoned “play about a monster-ghost-love-story.” Judging from the spooktacular tracks we’ve heard thus far, this may be one of the rare releases to break free from the dreaded “actor-turned-musician curse.” The debut’s goose bump-inducing tracklisting can be viewed below.

Dead Man’s Bones:

01 Intro
02 Dead Hearts
03 In the Room Where You Sleep
04 Buried in Water
05 My Body’s a Zombie for You
06 Pa Pa Power
07 Young & Tragic
08 Paper Ships
09 Lose Your Soul
10 Werewolf Heart
11 Dead Man’s Bones
12 Flowers Grow Out of My Grave

(www.deadmansbones.net)