CASKET LOTTERY – CHOOSE BRONZE

Some may view The Casket Lottery with eyes tainted by Coalesce’s considerable legacy, since The Casket Lottery features two bass alumni of that snarling animal (Stacy Hilt and Nathan Ellis, and are rounded out by Nathan Richardson), but The Casket Lottery is a different musical endeavor altogether. On their Second Nature debut, Choose Bronze, intricately woven melodies become entangled with precision playing too emotionally engaging to be math rock or post punk but too exact and precise to be dismissed as simply emo rock. The Casket Lottery songs are self-contained journeys, fraught with ebbs and flows, embracing a particularly lush arrangement one moment and embarking upon a noise-inspired hammering the next. Jangly chords persist throughout, as does the level of musicianship and the seemingly endless conflict of quiet versus loud, deadlocked in its effectiveness. All the while the ardent vocals singing of tattered images and frayed thoughts convey a purity matched only by the music. Choose Bronze is a stunning sonic journey accompanied by startlingly sparse yet effective cover art, belying the music contained within.