charming disaster

VER THE COURSE OFfour merrily macabre albums between 2015 and 2022 — from Love, Crime & Other Trouble to Our Lady of Radium — Ellia Bisker and Jeff Morris, the Brooklyn-based cabaret-goth-folk duo known as Charming Disaster have created a theatrical aesthetic of whimsical murder ballads, twisted mythology, and strange religiosity.

Think Madame Blavatsky meets Edward Gorey meets Aesop meets John Bartram meets Nick Cave, and you’re partway to understanding Charming Disaster’s caustically funny and certainly darkly humorous brand of folksy folklore — the intersection of death and daring, mayhem and mirth, chimes and crimes and magic realism. Add in deep, Kohl eye-lined beauty and a black carney’s wardrobe, and the picture of Charming Disaster is complete.

However, starting with the Madame Curie-themed, Our Lady of Radium, greater love and respect for the escapades that make science and healing tick at the top of the 20th century crept into the Charming Disaster soundscape and lyrical brand of storytelling. Such a transition makes for an instinctive leap into its fifth album: the marriage of earthy organicism, metaphysical realms, and evergreening theater that is Super Natural History’s “cabinet of curiosities.”

One thing that intrigued this writer about what Charming Disaster does is its well-thought level of drama within each track; its theatricality is wound through every vocal melody and chorus like a spider’s web.

“I don’t that we set out to do certain things, per se, but Charming Disaster is based on the whole of our influences,” said Morris. “What we make is about how we are in the world.”

Storytelling, dark and light (but mostly dark) is of utmost importance to Charming Disaster, which is how the traditionalism of cabaret comes into play for the duo. “I cut my teeth as a performer in the circus world,” said Bisker. The circus, vaudeville, and the variety show inform me as far as my stage personae goes. Add to that our dark sense of humor — mortality always comes up in our work — and the fact that we play acoustic instruments, and that is who we are.”

Morris quickly adds that because there are only two members of Charming Disaster and theirs is a deeply bonded friendship that has lasted well over a decade, each over-emphasizes who they are as people on stage. “We try to make sure that we are giving you a show, whether hamming it up onstage or heightening reality when it comes to live performance.”

Morris and Bisker are elusive in how they came together, save to say that shared songwriting skills united them. “That’s not anything Jeff or I had ever done before, collaborate as writers,” she said. “Songwriting is such as personal process. But writing together as Charming Disaster has kept us together for so long that we have this kind of alchemy where together we are more than just the sum of our parts.”

Morris adds that after a decade+ of doing Charming Disaster as such, there is no going back to “single, solitary songwriting” or for large-scale bands beyond a

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A.D. AMOROSI