Review/Photos: Dead Man's Bones' at Schubas Tavern in Chicago, IL: 10.21.09
words and photos by Kirstie Shanley
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Not everyone can pull off making the special transition between acting to music easily, though more seem to be trying. With everything out there from the horrifically bad Jared Leto in 30 Seconds to Mars to the captivating train wreck that is Juliette Lewis, it seems almost like playing Russian Roulette when you venture into this realm of music. That said, Ryan Gosling surely doesn’t seem like he wants to be the next big thing to sweep the music industry. In fact, he doesn’t appear to even want anyone to know that he isn’t just a normal indie rock guitar/keyboard playing singer on stage. With his boy next door sort of looks, you might not even realize it yourself if you weren’t paying close attention.
His voice sure is special, though. It seems to emanate from a different sort of time where people jumped at werewolves howling and believed Nosferatu was real. His deep vibrato doesn’t even make auditory sense coming out of that slender body of his but it’s truly genuine. Between Zach Shields playing drums and Andye Jamieson soulful vocals drifting across the room, Dead Man’s Bones would have made for an animated three piece.
The fun didn’t stop there, though. In fact, charismatic Ryan Gosling wasn’t even the main highlight of the night and it’s clear he didn’t want to be, either. What Gosling has essentially done is pick children’s choirs from each city and have them be the stars, giving these girls the glory. Dressed in Day of the Dead zombie wear, the choir (Chicago’s St. Andrews Children’s Choir) sang their hardest. Though it was interesting enough to have Gosling, Shields, and Jamieson sing in front of a graveyard backdrop, having a dozen Catholic school girls shout out “My body’s a zombie for you!” pretty much takes the cake. At one point, one of the older choir girls even pretended to die on stage then preceded to sing a long solo stage center.
I’m not sure what genre to even place the music itself in, though they list gothic, gospel, and showtunes on their myspace page and that somewhat touches on no doubt some main inspiring elements. To get to the heart of the matter, it’s the perfect music for Halloween…definitely with a sense of the spooky. The songs are reminiscent of haunted sped up 50s tracks in some moments and more idiosyncratic indie rock in others. If God was a zombie, it could be gospel and if showtunes were haunted darker affairs it might also work. Say, if the setting was a real graveyard, for instance and all the ghosts were killer dancers.
Though it’s not quite clear what Ryan Gosling is doing with this musical project, it’s pretty obvious he adores these kids and that the feeling is mutual. He seems to get more a kick out of them singing than he does performing the songs on his own. It’s also probable that those children and all in attendance will remember the performance they witnessed for the rest of their lives (or in their undead afterlives).
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