-=- SHGZ -=-
* Shoegaze * Indie * Post-Rock * Grunge * Dream Pop * Psych-Rock * Ethereal *
Artist..: The Casket Girls
Album...: True Love Kills The Fairy Tale
GENRE...: Indie
STYLE...: Indie Rock, Synth-pop, Electronic, Rock
YEAR....: 2014
ENCODER..: LAME 3.98.4 -V0 LABEL...: Graveface
BITRATE..: 252 kbps avg SOURCE..: CD
SIZE.....: 73.39 MB TRACKS..: 10
URL..: http://www.graveface.com/the-casket-girls.html
- TRACKLIST
1 Same Side 4:15
2 Day To Day 3:30
3 Chemical Dizzy 3:48
4 Ashes And Embers 4:03
5 True Love Kills The Fairy Tale 3:58
6 Secular Love 4:29
7 Holding You Back 3:36
8 Stone And Rock 3:22
9 Perfect Little Soul 4:44
10 The Chase 4:43
Total Playtime: 40:28
The Casket Girls' 2012 debut, Sleepwalking, was a darkly haunted affair, its
creepy textures and cemetery-at-midnight harmonies the result of a chance
meeting between Black Moth Super Rainbow's Ryan Graveface and sisters Elsa
and Phaedra Greene. Graveface gave the relative strangers a stack of
instrumentals he'd been working on and the sisters fleshed them out into
full-on songs with their dour lyrical imagery and untrained, homespun
melodies. For second album True Love Kills the Fairy Tale, the trio repeated
this somewhat unorthodox creative process, again calling on drummer TW Walsh
to play live percussion over Graveface's roller-rink electronic rhythms. True
Love Kills the Fairy Tale retains some of the spooky, misty,
ghost-in-the-graveyard qualities of its predecessor, but the overall feel is
far more dreamy and textural, offering something more spirited than
emotionally uneasy. Built on an overused, grating Casio rhythm preset, album
opener "Same Side" immediately transcends its played-out musical backdrop
with Elsa and Phaedra's searching harmonies and interlocking vocal melodies.
The songs have a heightened drive this time around, with choruses to tunes
like "Chemical Dizzy" and the brilliant title track having an almost
anthem-like catchiness. Always singing in tandem, with off-kilter lyrics
about everything from doing drugs to daily living triggering oppressive
ennui, the Greene sisters seem almost detached from Graveface's increasingly
synth pop instrumentals. While the songs on True Love Kills the Fairy Tale
are solid as is, the melodies and vocal arrangements are so strong, one
wonders what they'd be like dropped somewhere other than atop Graveface's
watery vintage synth-based instrumentals. Exciting and moving, the songs on
True Love Kills the Fairy Tale would work just as well stripped-down and
spare as they do in the intricately produced electro-pop forms presented
here.
*
The Casket Girls (a.k.a. sisters Elsa and Phaedra Greene and
producer/multi-instrumentalist Ryan Graveface) draw on all things cabalistic
for their sophomore album, True Love Kills the Fairy Tale. And it bears
mentioning that this is a trio for whom the occult is not merely
flavor-of-the-month affectation. According to Graveface, he dropped off a
handful of instrumental tracks to the sisters, and when he returned, they
were reading poetry to each other in a trance-like state, one sobbing and the
other furiously scribbling lyrics. Days later, when the group recorded the
songs in the studio, the Greene sisters claimed to have no memory of writing
the songs, as if they'd been conceived in a fugue state.
Such creation lore serves as a fascinating, if perhaps marketing-embellished,
background to the experience of listening to the Casket Girls' languorously
told tales of spaceships, phantom romances, and cosmic dreams. True Love
Kills the Fairy Tale is one of the few psych-pop albums in recent memory in
which the lyrics are as rich and evocative as the synth-driven beats laid
beneath them. Graveface fills the album with eerie, droning walls of sound
shot through with just enough alluring melodies and goose-bump-inducing
drops. Still, the Black Moth Super Rainbow guitarist keeps his arrangements
atmospheric and austere, with the occasional fetching hook to give his sonic
baubles just enough pop accessibility.
On Chemical Dizzy, the sisters declare, Numbers can't explain the universe
connection between a mind and a dreamαYou and I are like water and
fire/Opposites only exist with each other. They jump from their fascination
with the fabric of dreams to elemental dichotomies in a single breath, only
to later softly threaten, There's nothing more dangerous than a wounded
heart. It's a song of gloriously unabashed apothegms, stringing together
unrelated objects and impulses with a kind of dreamy synchronicity. Such
psychic inclusiveness speaks to their unorthodox creative process, which
they've claimed includes practicing openness to the collective unconscious.
Secular Love may be the preeminent example of the album's brand of
discursive, opium-dream poetry, as the girls lazily hum, It's classical/An
invitation to a golden age/It's celestial/A spaceship from a steel cage,
over Graveface's sludgy synths and distorted guitar drops. Phaedra and Elsa,
who, of course, grew up in a funeral home in Savannah, Georgia, tap into a
sort of gauzy, pink dream factory, churning out a cavalcade of non sequiturs,
twee aphorisms, and paradoxes, delivered all in a sing-song lilt.
Graveface's soporific production does grow a little tiresome by album's end,
as he's content to rely too heavily on a triad of gritty, disintegrated
guitar lines, drum machines, and drowning swarms of reverb. But there's no
denying that his colorful, viscous canvases serve as the ideal stage for the
sisters to do their thing. True Love Kills the Fairy Tale flourishes in the
complex tension between the Greenes' mellifluous vocal harmonies, their
jarring, amorphous lyrics, and the haunted-house dream pop in which both are
encased.
-=- SHGZ -=-
P.S.
** Thanks ***
*** BCC FNT IPC SSR ***
*** For Knowing Where The Music Is At ***
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