REVIEW: Casket Girls - The Night Machines

Kelly Kirwan

The Greene sisters have cultivated their own brand of Southern Gothic. Living in Savannah as self-styled "recluses," the two have drawn a following with their soft, even vocals which always serve to temper their dissonant, organ-synth melodies. Their selective ventures into the public eye are to perform as Casket Girls, a term that’s carried the question mark of a ghost story in its own right.

As the legend goes, casket girls were groups of women brought over from Europe, mostly to Louisiana. They were meant to be brides, but whispers and side-eyes grew, and soon the matrimonial exchange evolved into the idea that casket girls were, in fact, otherworldly. It’s no wonder that Phaedra and Elsa Greene felt akin to these waifs and their ghostly reputation. Their promotional posters always incorporate a motif of blindness, a palm or cloth covering the eye, conjuring up references to the wool-spinning Moirai, sisters of fate that could see the future in the thread they spun. 

It’s a theme that carries over into their latest album, The Night Machines, which dives into supernatural subjects like clairvoyance and our delicate mortality. The deep, unwavering percussion comes into play, courtesy of TW Walsh (of Pedro the Lion), along with Ryan Graveface (of Black Moth, and of course the band's label Graveface Records) rounding out their shades of shoegaze goth. It’s a sort of airy punk-mysticism that Casket Girls have developed over the past few years with steady success.

Their track "Walk the Water" begins with an eerie sort of exhale—a phantom’s cry, or a gust of wind? It then breaks into a tangy synth evocative of a pipe organ, whose keys are being pressed with fervent abandon. “We live in this unusual world / Isn’t it delusional?” they pose, their voices veering into a higher pitch, before adding, “Walk the water / Seek the past,” alluding, it seems, to our flawed sense of the real. Casket Girls give us the pin to poke holes in those presumptions, coming to us as songbird sages or fortune tellers, backed by a catchy hook. 

"Mermaid Cottage" unfolds with a crinkling beat and, again, that organ pitch against a gentle trill, "I dream of sin / That glitters in the sun / Where you and I will rest my darling one ... We’ll shed our skin and finally get free." It’s a softer song, an air of indie pop that feels at peace, without those darker inklings we’ve come to know previously.

The thing with truth, the Greene sisters warn, is that "it always shatters." On The Night Machines, we see how their dreams and their affinity for the magical is more than just an escape. It’s a respite, an acceptance, and a sense of freedom in the tides that will "wash away our skin" and leave behind a specter that knows no earthly tethers. Casket Girls' aesthetic is more than mere affectation, and it begs to be embraced.

REVIEW: Stardeath and White Dwarfs // Casket Girls - What Keeps You Up At Night

Laura Kerry

Stardeath and White Dwarfs are no strangers to collaboration. Their last album, Wastoid (2014), features New Fumes, Chrome Pony, and another wee little band you may have heard of: The Flaming Lips. They also worked with The Flaming Lips on covers of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King. It’s a well-deserved collaboration, but not without nepotism; Dennis Coyne, the lead singer of Stardeath and White Dwarfs, is the nephew of Wayne Coyne, the front man of that better-known experimental rock band. The two groups share more than blood, though, with similar voices and an atmospheric, psychedelic sound.

The Oklahoma-based band finds a less obvious partnership in the dream-pop trio Casket Girls, with whom they share their latest EP, What Keeps You Up At Night. From Savannah, Georgia, the Casket Girls formed in a way that I imagine all bands from Savannah do (disclaimer: I have never been there)—after producer Ryan Graveface happened upon sisters Phaedra and Elsa Green playing autoharp and singing beneath a tree. That kind of whimsical narrative is fitting for a band that sometimes sounds like a fuzzed-out psych-rock group, occasionally sounds like a syrupy pop band, but always sounds dreamy and romantic.

Alternating songs, with two total for each group, the EP makes the Casket Girls sound a little more psychedelic and Stardeath and White Dwarfs seem a little more pop (emphasis on “a little”). Starting with the Georgia trio’s “Western World,” a seemingly straightforward pop song with a beat as at home in a ‘60s girl group song as in this one, the sisters sing, “We commiserate at heaven’s gate / There’s nothing natural left in the Western world,” lyrics that don’t read well but translate seamlessly in their simple delivery. Underneath the bleak message with a cheery tone, though, a droning synth line slides around, lending the music a floating, off-balanced feeling that sends it further into the realm of fuzz and surrealism.

Their second song, “Deep Time,” continues that journey with a reverberatingly mournful synth and a metaphysical refrain, “Am I you, are you me, are we free / Are we lost in deep time?” that more clearly shows why they’ve thrown their lot in with Stardeath and White Dwarfs, whose part of the album, while it can’t exactly be classified as pop, is mostly accessible. Both of their songs, echoing and cavernous as they are, rely on simply repeating structures that add clarity and rootedness despite the feeling that they are floating. A section or two in the slow final song, “What Keeps You Up At Night,” even border on catchy, and the noisier, more driving “Egostatic” opens itself up to pop sentiments in the sparser last section: “A lot’s been said now / And you can’t take it back.”

Set side-by-side, the songs of the two bands form terrain textured with objects both of and out of this world. Between the dreamscape of the Casket Girls and the space odyssey of Stardeath and White Dwarfs, What Keeps You Up At Night is a brief but intriguing album to wander through.