Photo: Hama Sanders
With their psychedelic flourishes, suffocated vocals and lyrics featuring love stores about werewolves, ghosts and other creatures of the night, Dead Man’s Bones sound like the demon spawn of the Misfits, Bauhaus and the Zombies. The Los Angeles duo, comprised of actor Ryan Gosling and Zach Shields, release their self-titled debut album on October 6th, and Rolling Stone has your first listen to the ghoulishly infectious track “In the Room Where You Sleep” right here:

Get a look at more actors who rock.

“In the Room Where You Sleep” could fit on either a psych-soaked Nuggets compilation or the soundtrack of a Vincent Price film. For a song that employs no electric guitars — in fact, no stringed instruments appear on the album at all — the track truly rocks. While the Silver Lake Conservatory of Music Children’s Choir feature prominently on the duo’s debut LP, and early versions of “In the Room Where You Sleep” included the choir, the final version finds Gosling and Shields painting the creepy picture themselves.

Dead Man’s Bones came together when Gosling and Shields met in Toronto while dating sisters in 2005. (Fun fact: actress Rachel McAdams and her sis Kayleen.) The pair shared a fascination with ghosts, so they began working on a monster love story for the stage. When that undertaking proved too great, they refocused what they had written and turned it into their debut album. Growing up in Canada, the Langley Schools Music Project — a choir featuring 60 untrained children singing songs of the era — served as a major inspiration for Gosling, and led him to recruit the Silver Lake Conservatory.

When Dead Man’s Bones embark on their first tour next month — the trek fittingly kicking off two weeks before Halloween — they will recreate the songs off their self-titled debut by employing a local choir from the cities they visit on their trek. To add to the old-time feel of the performance, each concert will feature a talent show in place of the traditional opening act.

Check out the tour dates below:

Oct. 14 – Cambridge, MA @ Brattle Theatre
Oct. 15 – New York, NY @ LPR
Oct. 16 – Philadelphia, PA @ First Unitarian Church Sanctuary
Oct. 17 – Washington, D.C. @ Sixth And I Historic Synagogue
Oct. 19 – Montreal, CA @ Le National
Oct. 20 – Toronto, CA @ The Music Gallery
Oct. 21 – Chicago, IL @ Schubas Tavern (two shows)
Oct. 23 – Seattle, WA @ The Triple Door
Oct. 24 – Vancouver, CA @ Venue
Oct. 25 – Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios
Oct. 27 – San Francisco, CA @ Swedish American Hall
Oct. 30 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Regent

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With no major releases hitting stores this week, Rolling Stone shines the spotlight on a trio of up-and-coming artists in this week’s New Reviews. Leading the way with a three-and-a-half star review is Yacht, whose fourth album See Mystery Lights marks the duo’s first album on the acclaimed DFA label, home of LCD Soundsystem and Hercules and Love Affair. The brainchild of Portland, Oregon-based Jona Bechtolt, See Mystery Lights is also YACHT’s first album to feature vocalist Claire Evans as a full member, and the duo produce an album with Talking Heads art-pop sensibilities and loads of synth. “The throbbing singalong ‘Summer Song’ will sound killer bumping from ad-hoc porch discos during the coming months,” Rolling Stone’s Christian Hoard writes in his review.

Next is the debut album Exposed from 19-year-old singer Kristinia DeBarge. Kristinia certainly has the pedigree to try her hand at Rihanna’s throne: Her father James was one of the members of the R&B group DeBarge, who were like a poor man’s Jackson family back in the 1980’s. Plus, DeBarge gets a helping hand from hit machines like Babyface and OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder on Exposed, which earned a three-star rating from RS. Further helping DeBarge on her path to stardom is Britney Spears, who recruited DeBarge to open some dates of her Circus tour.

This week also marks the return of Australia’s Howling Bells, who follow up their 2006 self-titled debut with their dream pop-packed Radio Wars. In his three-star review of the album, Kevin O’Donnell likens the band to “If Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval teamed up with shoegaze icons My Bloody Valentine.” The lyrics are lacking, but the music itself and singer Juanita Stein’s sumptuous voice more than make up for it.

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A song I wrote in 2002 for a friend of mine, Emma Howell, after she drowned in Brazil. I made this recording in a neighbor’s basement studio, and it benefits a lot from that—it’s much cleaner than the stuff I was recording myself at that point, and he had the good sense to keep me honest about not settling for a take I wasn’t happy with on any of the instruments.

Even six years later, I think it’s one of the better recordings I’ve made. I’m not sure how I managed to not post it before.

Emma was a poet and a dreamer and seemed to be or at least to want to be 18-going-on-40 for as long as I knew her. The two of us weren’t especially close, but she was a kind of social glue among some of my very good friends, and a charming and charismatic being in her own right—a sort of nexus, not just for me I think but many people moving through that time and place in Portland.

When I spoke at a memorial reading for her in the last year or so, it struck me how narrowly she managed to miss the era of social internet ubiquity—she had no internet paper trail; googling turned up very little about her other than some obituaries and news about a posthumous volume of her poetry. This, I guess, will be on of those little signposts in the road, marking out her life and death.
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