((The Casket Girls)) Band Profile and Upcoming Chicago Concerts - Oh My Rockness

Written by Patrick McNamara

Savannah, Georgia’s The Casket Girls are two sisters (Phaedra and Elsa Greene) with lovely voices who sing off-kilter pop songs full of fuzzy wonderment. Additional instrumentation and sound direction is provided by Ryan Graveface (who works at a label that coincidentally is also called Graveface - it’s like, what are the odds of something like that happening!? - the only thing I can think to compare it to is, like, how Lou Gehrig actually ended up dying from Lou Gehrig’s disease - it’s like, what are the chances of THAT!).

The warm and warbled melodies The Casket Girls make flutter and stutter towards ear pleasing singability. It’s accessibly weird. This is like if CHVRCHES weren’t so on-the-nose or something. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Because I do believe on-the-nose is called pop and I got no beef with pop, bub. But there’s also something to be said for listening to a band and not being able to spot the climactic chorus coming at you from a million miles away. That’s what The Casket Girls do. They mix it up and take you where you need to be - which very well may be nowhere - but at least nowhere is still somewhere - because something can’t exist without nothing - you know? Oh, yeah. YOU know.

Now….. knowing that one of the members also runs a record label perhaps leads to my initial skepticism about what I’m going to say next. The Casket Girls’ peeps are working the angles and tossing an interesting (if implausible) backstory for the media wind to spin. Apparently, Ryan Graveface discovered the Greene sisters singing under a tree in a public park communicating with the undead or something and was transfixed. I don’t think it was a Bodhi tree. But it might as well have been.

Shortly after this public display of satori, the sisters agreed to record a demo for Graveface. They did so in one night at home in a transcendent state of semi-consciousness. Weeping and chanting was involved. The next morning, the Phaedra and Elsa handed Graveface the demo and claimed to not remember anything that was on it - but probably hoped it was pretty good. Of course, this demo just so happened to be amazing and was then duly recorded "properly” by Graveface without changing a note. The result of such mysticism is their upcoming album “True Love Kills The Fairy Tale.”

So basically, this album was created by spiritual forces. The Greene sisters’ hard work and practice and talent had absolutely nothing to do with the making of this record. Nope. Nothing at all. God did it.

(This is kind of like the myth of Jack Kerouac writing “On the Road” in one furious out-of-body “spontaneous” session. Do you know how many drafts of that book he laboriously worked on in the years leading up to that famous continuous scroll session? LOTS. And when it was done, he didn’t have to be reminded or told it was good. That fucker knew.)

Enough of all that. Just listen to these Casket Girls songs. If you like them like I like them, cool. If you don’t like them, that’s cool too. Either way, get that magical supernatural PR spin angle OUTTA HERE. I spent this whole time discussing THAT instead of discussing the BAND.

Oh well. At least I won’t remember ever writing this band profile five minutes from now.

Published January 13, 2014
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