Graves, Release Your Dead (Svart Records) is the latest album from Finland’s vampire-admiring (maybe “obsessed” is the word) The Coffinshakers. According to the band’s online blurb, they’ve been making horror comedy since 1995. Now if that feels like rather a long time to be riding this fairly simple gimmick, well it’s just a fleeting moment for a night walker, eh?
Part Johnny Cash cowboy-evoking Country and part fifties Surf Rock played with crisp economy, you might listen to Graves, Release Your Dead, and think it’s about the farthest thing from innovation you could imagine.
And you would perhaps be right, but we’re not here for wild experimentation. We’re here for a cowboy ridin’ his horse along the prairie. An undead cowboy. With fangs. At night, obviously. Probably a skeleton horse. And anyway, The Cramps have made a several-decade career of pastiching the fifties, so why not anyone else?
Any of these tracks might snugly fit into the soundtrack of True Detective – especially the opening title track, which plays like a deadpan take on The Handsome Family‘s “Far from Any Road”. They might even just about manage to sneak into a Tarantino movie without getting called out. They’d probably be the classiest element of a True Blood episode.
There are some novel touches here and there (relatively novel, given the intentionally retro format), the pleasantly deployed fiddles that first appear on “Wretches” for example. And who could deny the comic appeal of singer Rob Coffinshaker (Robert Fjällsby to his mother) so smoothly intoning “there’s no hope for the wretches from hell”?
The occasionally-deployed, wailing backing singer adds a little dash of dramatic impact when she joins proceedings (as on “Holes of Oblivion”), but at all times Mr. Coffinshaker himself delivers each line with suave, cold calm. Maybe that’s exactly how a vampire would do it? Aha! Were Coffinshakers led with Glenn Danzig or Roy Orbison-style melodrama, it would make this an entirely different proposition. Coffinshakers tell every tale of damned nightwalkers straight-faced and collected. I guess that’s how it would be done in 1954 too.
Within the limitations of their own refined joke, the closing track “The Great Silence” delivers by far the album’s peak of cinematic drama, with some well-deployed strings, fiddles, and our wailing lady of the night.
No more than that, but no less than exactly what Coffinshakers are shooting for, a pitch-perfect enjoyable little Scandinavian pastiche of 1950s US Country Rock n Roll. And vampires.
Buy the album here:
6 / 10
TOM OSMAN