#2033 Dead Man's Bones - Dead Man's Bones

Do yourself a favor, don't do any research into this one. Treat it like a kid at your door on Halloween- let it be what it pretends. Treat it like a dusty record you found in a dead great-uncle's attic and spun yourself haunted, an echo from an underfunded, undertalented bunch of kids that shouted themselves hoarse just to be heard a generation later. It's a record that has that magic, something small and impossible, so lo-fi and awkwardly paced that it seems beyond awareness of your needs, a record on its own terms, shades of the Microphones circa It Was Hot We Stayed in the Water, at their most atomic and accidentally beautiful; wisps of the immortal Unicorns at their most offkilter and spare.

Children sing and chant imprecisely, frail indie crooning limps in, rickety organs and offcenter claps clop by, humble stums set cobwebs in the corners - it lurches and puffs, a ghost of a record, breathing out and breathing in and breathing out and breathing in through brittle bones, mixed so it sounds ready to crumble if you listen too closely.

Slow, occaisionally overcute, demanding justtheright mood, generally creaky and imperfect -- but it's an artifact: sincerely spooky, quietly beautiful, truly unique, wholly worth hearing. A minor treasure that I was terrifically happy to stumble upon 4/5