CASKET GIRLS play Bootleg Theater June 26; Press photo
The Casket Girls, known for their far-out stage shows and girl-group by-way-of graveyard sound, are coming to LA Jun 26 for a show at the Bootleg Theater. While sisters and co-lead singers Phaedra and Elsa Greene often get all the attention with their platinum wigs and choreographed dance moves, make sure you look for a masked man toiling away on the keyboards. That’s multi-band member, multi-label owner, and self-professed lunatic Ryan Graveface.
“I’ll get offstage and people will be like, ‘Hey, were you onstage?’ And I say, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well what did you do?’ and it’s like, ‘I played all the music!’,” Graveface said.
“It’s kind of cool, because I guess that means that they’re so focused on the other aspects that I’m inconsequential.”
Not many musicians would be as nonchalant about being “inconsequential” onstage. Then again, Graveface is no ordinary musician. More of an anti-musician, he writes songs out of borderline-schizo necessity.
“I write because I hear shit in my head, and I have to get it out. It’s that simple. It’s not sexy.”
He played his first, $7-a-month guitar incorrectly for six whole months.
“I had it laying down as though it was a lap steel or something. I never watched music videos or anything, so I had no idea what the hell I was doing.”
And, most interestingly, he says he really doesn’t give a shit about music.
“It’s not like I fell in love with music once I started writing,” Graveface said.
“I don’t listen to anything. The only shit that I like, is the stuff that I release on one of my labels. It’s just funny. I have a record store, I have two record labels (Graveface and Terror Vision), I co-own a music PR firm, everything is musical. And yet, I quite frankly don’t like it that much.”
Before you scoff, and dismiss Graveface as desperately trying to seem above it all, there are elements of his life in music he enjoys. Being in the Casket Girls for instance, seems to have been charmed for him from the start, when he stumbled upon the Greene sisters singing songs to each other in a park, just after deciding he wanted to start a new band.
“I wanted my version of a contemporary, Shangri-la’s type band,” Graveface recalled.
“Almost all quote, unquote, girl groups today are garage-y, but not Shangri-la’s garage-y, which is more highly produced and just incredibly well done, actually. So that was the impetus.”
The combination of Graveface’s lush and nuanced musical beds, with the girls’ spellbinding lyrics and dreamy vocals has been fulfilling on more than a musical level.
“It’s the only project I’ve ever been in that actually feels like a true collaboration,” Graveface said.
“It’s just really nice. It actually feels like we’re a family in a weird way, too. We fight like brothers and sisters, and we love each other like brothers and sisters, and we collaborate like I think a family would.”
Before he gets too ooey-gooey, he’s quick to add, “Then again, most families are dysfunctional.”
The fans also seem to be a bright spot for Graveface. He planned the setlist for this tour around what fans on Facebook said they wanted to hear.
“I mean, if someone’s paying to see you, I do feel they should get what they came for,” Graveface noted.
“If someone is gonna be happy about us playing a certain song, hell yeah, we’ll play it.”
Rounding out the setlist will be songs from their latest effort, The Night Machines, a diverse album filled with electro-pop, shoegaze beats that swing spooky to sacchrine, with lyrics from the personal “Beyond a Shadow” to the political, scathing “Tears of a Clown”. Ever the workaholic, The Night Machines is rooted in a sci-fi story Graveface has been working on for years.
“Do you really want me to get into all this,” Graveface laughed before continuing:
“In this story, modern medicine has come so far that, unless it’s a car accident or something of that nature, people don’t die. We start to notice that the way we love is actually rooted in death, not life. So in the absence of death, people become very cold, crass, and evil. This underground movement begins with the Night Machines. They reject all of that and basically start a rebellion.”
Included with each vinyl copy of the album is one page of the story, different from anyone else’s.
“To read the story you have to get online and share it with people, and there’s different versions of the story, so it’s going to confuse the hell out of people,” Graveface said.
Confusing people is something Graveface has grown accustomd to, especially with the Casket Girls’ live shows. Described as everything from “failed California porn stars”, to a “living art piece” he is well aware that they are best experienced with an open mind.
“I just think we’re bizarre,” Graveface confessed.
“We get a fair amount of bad live reviews, and it’s not because we sound like shit, it’s more like they just don’t get it. There’s just something that doesn’t click with a certain type of person, and we just come across as assholes [laughs].”