Dead Man's Bones: Dead Man's Bones (Anti/Shock)

This will be an acquired taste but its release around Halloween is I suppose apt, especially if for you Halloween is a Serious Event and doesn't have a lot to do with buying a witches' hat or trick'n'treat.

A project for the actor Ryan Gosling and his mate Zach Shields, this is like a faux-spooky meltdown of a kitsch carnival House of Horrors, a small part of Tom Waits, a BBC sound effects record, drums like heartbeats, eerily distant voices, a children's choir and an intermediate school end-of-year production.

It is somewhat polished and although perhaps not as scary as they might think, it has a slightly unnerving quality (kids choirs can do that to you) and the Kurt Weill-styled ballads over old time piano are the highpoints.

The Fifties-styled My Body's a Zombie For You (with kids shouting the chorus) is kinda fun.

Nick Cave (or Rob Zombie and Marilyn Manson come to that) will feel threatened by this, and I doubt that I will play it more than a couple of times after this.

But if a slightly disembodied and dark album with song titles like Buried in Water and Flowers Grow Out of My Grave sounds like what you've been waiting for (or you a teacher looking for a song idea for that last assembly), then here it is at last.

I like the line on the back cover though: "Never let a lack of talent get you down".