Generally speaking, when actors decide to have music side projects there are no amount of snide remarks that adequately capture the stunning self-indulgent, needless stupidity and absolute terribleness of their musical results. In the case of Dead Man’s Bones, a new band featuring Ryan Gosling (“Half-Nelson” and “Lars and the Real Girl”) and his best friend/normal person Zach Shields the opposite seems to be true.
The music is, against almost all logical expectations of a music snob like myself, really good. In an interview with Pitchfork the guys explain that over the several years they’ve been collaborating they’ve worked with several different producers who tried to make them more contemporary (which we’ll assume means “sucky”) and after hearing the results of these sessions, they opted for a more lo-fi sound, with Tim Anderson of semi-credible L.A. band ImARobot producing. The project also enlists help from a choir of precocious kids from the Silverlake Conservatory of Music, a music education project founded by Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers – amazing live performance video below with the choir dressed in all manners of Halloween costumes that gives the whole affair a very creepy, dark Nick Cave visual by way of a much less polished Arcade Fire musical feel.
Kudos to Gosling for his integrity in his acting choices for the last few years and now his promising music career. In other good new for acting integrity, IMDB indicates that we’ll be seeing Gosling in two intriguing features at some point in the near future: “Blue Valentine,” with Michelle Williams attached to co-star, which seems to be about time-traveling lovers and “The Dallas Buyer’s Club” about a man in the 1980s who is diagnosed with HIV and starts toying around with underground drugs not approved for use in the U.S. at the time (the latter sounds completely amazing and we cannot wait to hear more). Until then we can and will continue to pretend Ryan Gosling is our boyfriend on the Fuck Yeah! blog.