The Casket Lottery’s Nathan Ellis on the band’s brief return (and its vinyl reissues) ahead of Saturday’s Bottleneck show

The Casket Lottery’s debut LP, Choose Bronze, turns 20 years old next year. Originally released via Kansas City’s Second Nature Recordings, the album, along with the post-hardcore group’s Moving Mountains and Survival Is For Cowards, is getting reissued for Record Store Day by Boston label, Run For Cover Records.

In addition to the records being once again available individually and as a limited-edition box set (and on killer-looking colored vinyl, to boot), the band’s going on a short tour to celebrate. It’s been a few years since the Casket Lottery’s last run of shows, so we checked in with the band’s guitarist and singer, Nathan Ellis, to see what brought all of this about.

The Pitch: What led to these three LPs being reissued?

Nathan Ellis: I don’t really know what really sparked the conversation between Run For Cover Records and Second Nature, but it kind of came to my attention about 18 months ago that they were thinking about it, and wanted to repress the first three records. They’ve been out of press for a long time, so it seemed like a good time to do it.

It was an excuse for us to get our stuff together and go out and play some shows, so whatever excuse we had, we decided to jump on it and book some out-of-town shows. It’s been a while. I think Choose [Bronze] hasn’t had an LP pressing since 2001/2002 or something like that. We just sold what we could at the time and moved on, and Dan [Askew, head of Second Nature] was kind of wrapping up the label. The last seven, eight years he hasn’t done anything or had any reason to repress our records.

He got contacted by Run For Cover to license them, and it seemed like a good idea. I got the LP box sets yesterday, and I just got to go through them. I’m super-impressed with what they did with them. They got the gold foil stamping, the spot gloss. They did everything, and I’m really happy with them, and glad they did them right, you know?

The fact that these reissues are on Run For Cover is interesting. I assumed it would’ve been No Sleep, since they released the last Casket Lottery record, Real Fear, as well as last year’s Able Baker Fox LP.

I think Run For Cover just asked. They asked Dan if he had any plans with those records, so they got the conversation started.

Other than the colored vinyl, are there any other deluxe aspects to these reissues, such as liner notes, remastering, or anything like that?

No. As far as the sound, there’s no remixing or remastering, and quite honestly, if they had asked to do that, I would’ve said no because of the way all those records sound. I wouldn’t want to mess with it. Quite honestly, when you have an album that’s been around for like, ten years, and people have listened to it enough, it sounds funny when you remaster a record that everyone’s familiar with. It’s gross — it’s not right, you know?

So, once that record comes out, it is what it is. I can’t think of many remastered records where I’m like, “So glad they did that!” We just left it alone. Ed Rose crushed it on all those recordings, and he always oversaw at least the choice in who mastered those records, and he always approved the masters, so I didn’t want to touch it. They sound exactly the same.

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What’s the process of getting the band back together to play the first shows in almost five years?

The biggest hurdle we had, initially, is just that Junior [Nathan Richardson] is too busy with life. He’s just got too much going on. We have Jason Trabue playing drums on the shows that we’ve got coming up, just kind of as a substitute drummer. Other than, just making sure that everybody’s got the time to take the time off and get out and do it. Obviously, we’re all busy with normal day-to-day life stuff, so we have to carve out weekly band practice times and all that, and that’s an adjustment, you know? That’s the toughest part, especially playing with five of us. That’s a lot of information to figure out, but everybody was excited and wanted to make it happen. We pulled it off [laughs]. 

The Casket Lottery plays the Bottleneck this Saturday, March 24, with Radar State and Mess. Details on that show here. You can pre-order the reissues of the Casket Lottery’s first three LPs via Run For Cover Records.