Review
The Casket Lottery
Real Fear

When bands you adore get back together after breaking up or reconvene following a hiatus, there is both a sense of excitement and a feeling of trepidation as the band members become reacquainted with each other (moods, skills, shared synapses, seeming simpatico, etc) behind the scenes, and there is always this standard (whether fair or not) that the band’s previous material is held up to by its former audience; so, following a short teaser single, The Casket Lottery returns with their first full length in quite a while (particularly for them as their first tenure produced three albums and numerous splits and EPs in roughly five years) bringing up just the same feelings for me.

Just like with the single for the “The Door”, Real Fear took me quite a while to realize that I was listening to The Casket Lottery until one day the album clicked while “Baptistina” (excellent song with a nice hook in the chorus) was playing really loud in my car; but I believe that some of the problem comes from the fact that the band is no longer a three piece (adding another guitar player as well as a keyboard player), and where the band used to have all three instruments firm and distinct in the mix that no longer seems to be the case. If you listen to songs like “Baptistina”, “Poor Dorian”, and “Pamina” (both of which have these weird synth parts that just are so distracting) you can almost hear the original trio grappling with the two new members, particularly the keyboards as they seemingly dominate sections of the songs; instead of a more seamless melding as you can hear in “The Door”, “Ghost Whiskey”, and “Radiation Bells” where the keyboards accent the established sound and songwriting of the core trio, and longtime listeners can point to and say, “now that is The Casket Lottery.” Then there are songs like “In The Branches” that might hint at an awesome future for the five piece version of the band with its big sound and ambitious arrangement that certainly shows off just what The Casket Lottery can do.

Real Fear works well in some ways and not so much in others as it shows the original three band members seemingly returning with some fire in their bellies as the album has a much more aggressive sound at points (see the almost thrash of “Blood On The Handle”) but also some nice laid back moments to balance as well as some strong pop songs; there are three songs that I could certainly do without on the album which really kind of fall flat (“The Moon And The Tide”, “Pamina” and “Poor Dorian” all three of which I skip now) and drag what is otherwise a nice return from an awesome band.