By Alex Schaaf

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the year’s many underappreciated albums. Last week it was Andrew Bird’s Useless Creatures, an album that most non-fans didn’t even know existed. This week’s album is slightly better known, but it is one that is easy to cast off without giving it a serious thought.

I am speaking of Dead Man’s Bones, and their debut self-titled album. Dead Man’s Bones is the musical project of actors Ryan Gosling and Zach Shields, with the help of the Silverlake Conservatory Children’s Choir. Gosling started the buzz earlier this year by releasing a couple of music videos that showcased the group’s obsession with ghosts and ghouls along with their darkly catchy songs, and the October release of “Dead Man’s Bones” hit just in time for the Halloween season.

Gosling and Shields created the album under a set of very old-fashioned rules – no click tracks, no electric guitars, no more than three tracks, etc. – and the feeling transfers to the music. Comprised of thirteen tracks, the album is full of delightfully creepy moments, from Gosling’s utterance of “You better run/You better hide” on “In the Room Where You Sleep,” to the children’s choir belting out the titular chorus of “My Body’s A Zombie For You” to Gosling crooning “You’d look nice in a grave” on “Werewolf Heart.”

The music is pretty consistent throughout, mostly sticking to the lineup of acoustic guitar, piano, bass and drum, adding in some synth sounds and other effects here and there. The Silverlake Children’s Choir steals the show, as they appear every now and then to contribute a ghostly chorus or verse that adds childish excitement to such otherwise morbid lines as “I wish that we were magic/So we wouldn’t be so young and tragic.”

Gosling has certainly hit on something here in his unique use of the children’s choir next to the enthusiastic morbidity of most of the tracks. Some of the songs fall a little flat, such as “Dead Hearts,” which starts the album off a bit too slowly, or “In the Room Where You Sleep,” which is a great tune but one that doesn’t quite meet the high standard set by the live video of the song first posted by the band.

A few songs on this album could hold their own against any of the other great songs of 2009, however, like the grooving “Pa Pa Power” and the Arcade Fire-ish “My Body’s a Zombie For You,” which have both been on steady repeat for me over the last few months. Overall this is a very impressive project from an unexpected source, something that is always welcome. Whether such a novelty act will have any sort of staying power is yet to be seen, but it is enjoyable while it lasts.

Buy: Dead Man’s Bones