John Lucas

The coming of the Halloween season (and, admittedly, this article by my erstwhile colleague Mike Usinger) put me in mind of Dead Man’s Bones. I interviewed the duo back in 2009 and their self-titled album has been an October staple for me ever since.

L.A. duo Dead Man’s Bones gets downright spooky

This article originally appeared in the Georgia Straight.

The back cover of the self-titled debut by the Los Angeles-based duo Dead Man’s Bones is emblazoned with the sentence “Never let a lack of talent get you down.” That might seem a little disingenuous coming from an act whose talent got it signed to Epitaph Records’ Anti- imprint, and it seems even odder when you consider that one member of Dead Man’s Bones is Oscar-nominated actor Ryan Gosling. The Half Nelson star explains that, for him and his musical partner Zach Shields, the motto is a reminder not to get paralyzed by self-doubt.

“We were adults making a record for the first time, and we kind of felt like kids trying to figure out something for the first time,” Gosling explains in a three-way conference call with Shields and the Straight. “If we had listened to that part of ourselves that said, ‘You know, you’re not very good at this’ or ‘You shouldn’t bother’ or ‘People aren’t going to like it,’ then we would have never made the record.”

And that would have been a shame, because Dead Man’s Bones is one hell of a record. Accompanied by the Silverlake Conservatory of Music Children’s Choir, Gosling and Shields spin curiously romantic ballads about zombies and werewolves. There are exceptions to the rule—the keyboard-driven “Pa Pa Power” sounds like a new-wave version of the Arcade Fire—but the presiding feel is that of a spectral sock hop at Death Valley Middle School. “That’s all we know how to do,” the London, Ontario-born Gosling says. “For some reason, when we write songs, that’s just how they turn out. They have that kind of vibe, that sound to them, and then they end up being about ghosts and monsters falling in love.”

Indeed, “Lose Your Soul” finds Gosling crooning as if he were trying out for an afterlife version of American Bandstand, while Shields’s “Paper Ships” kicks off with a dooby-doo-wah refrain straight out of the Roy Orbison catalogue. Given the pair’s often-macabre subject matter and its tendency toward the sound of mid-20th-century pop, Dead Man’s Bones sometimes seems like a less aggro version of the Misfits.

“We love the Misfits,” Shields confirms. “They were one of my favourite bands, growing up. [Glenn] Danzig had that whole kind of crooner-y ’50s thing going on. A lot of those songs, if you slowed them down and played them acoustically, they’d be kind of ballad-y like that. They’re a little bit better musicians and a lot cooler than we are, but it’s nice to be in the same genre as them.”

A less obvious touchstone is the one over which Gosling and Shields first bonded: a shared obsession with the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland. “There’s something about that moment when you come around into the ballroom and all those ghosts are dancing with each other,” Gosling says. “I think I was 12 when I first saw that. It was kind of a relief, for some reason. It felt like maybe dying wasn’t so bad. Maybe it could be fun, too. It didn’t have to be so scary. And I think that it left an impression on me. I know that it did on Zach.”

To capture a little of the Halloween-pageant vibe of its album, Dead Man’s Bones has recruited choral groups to perform with it at each stop on its current tour, including the one in Vancouver.

“All the different choirs have been sending us YouTube videos of them in rehearsal, which has been awesome,” Gosling says. “It’s the best part, because then you get to see all the work that these kids are putting into it. It kind of puts the pressure on. They’ll never be as bad as we are. We try not to fail them.”