Smashed between psychedelia and grunge and amid a whole lot of noise sits Cranberry Casket, a five-piece band that hit the Athens music scene in fall 2023. The band’s sound is rooted in a patchwork of influence and appreciation of the unusual and experimental.
Vocalist and guitarist Martin Bradesca, a sophomore studying music production and guitar, said he began playing in bands in 2020. He took music more seriously during his senior year of high school but then had to abandon the bands he’d been working with when everyone left for their respective colleges. Once in Athens, he said Cranberry Casket formed from the ashes of four other bands that had to be left behind for school.
First to join Bradesca was songwriter, guitarist, and lead vocalist KJ Mueller, a junior studying production and guitar who had just left a Cleveland band that had gained a decent amount of traction. Bassist Luca Deliberato, a sophomore studying music education who had played in Bradesca’s high school band, was next, Bradesca said, then a Cleveland drummer named Steve Martis, a sophomore biological sciences major. With the addition of keyboardist Wesley Piai, a sophomore studying media production, the lineup was complete and Cranberry Casket was born.
Bradesca said it was very lucky everything and everyone came together in time for Cranberry Casket’s first performance at ACRN’s Battle of the Bands.
“From there, it just kind of snowballed,” he said. “We kept getting asked back, and I feel like that's the reason that we're pretty cemented in the scene now, is just because we kept doing stuff whenever we were asked to.”
Bradesca said the first few weeks of school last year were filled with intense rehearsals as Battle of the Bands took place Oct. 21 and the band had just formed.
“We really practiced ferociously for the first few weeks of the school year because we had to come up with completely new material,” he said. “We didn't have any songs for the band written at all, and we wrote all the songs we played for that first show in the first few weeks of school.”
As Cranberry Casket began to play shows, Bradesca said Radiohead quickly became an important figure to the band, beginning with their Radiohead covers at The Union’s show, The Biggest Cover-Up.
Photo by Maura Bradesca
“A bunch of people came in for our set and I just remember when we did Paranoid Android everyone was going pretty crazy,” Bradesca said. “I have a tendency to break my glasses a lot during shows … I also broke them when we were doing the Radiohead cover set because I shook them off my head and then I stomped on them accidentally.”
English rock band Radiohead formed in 1985 and is known for its fluidity of sounds that transcend subgenres of rock. Bradesca said the more peculiar aspects of Radiohead’s sound specifically are important to Cranberry Casket.
Among other influences on Cranberry Casket’s conglomerate of sound, Bradesca said the group’s bassist’s funk background brings a different flavor into the band’s sound, and English experimental noise rock band Black Midi also inspires them, as well as Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins. As far as personal influences go, Bradesca said he particularly draws influence from John Dwyer of the garage rock band Osees.
“It’s kind of weird because we have all these Radiohead influences and then I’ll often have these weird garage rock moments in the songs,” Bradesca said. “And (Dwyer) uses a lot of weird delay effects that are just kind of ugly but kind of cool at the same time. You contrast a lot of the beautiful, Radiohead-y passages but then if you have the dissonance too, it's a cool contrast.”
In terms of collecting all these influences into a cohesive sound, Bradesca said Cranberry Casket is hoping to begin recording soon but wants to make sure whatever the band puts out is as good as it can possibly be.
“We’ve done a few recordings of our songs but we scrapped them all just because we want to do better every time and are not satisfied with it,” Bradesca said. “You want to sit with those recordings and really make them perfect. But there’s also parts of us that just want to get stuff out of there.”
Bradesca said Cranberry Casket has been playing shows over the summer in Cleveland and has played a few shows in Columbus but wants to expand more within the Columbus and Cincinnati music scenes. In Athens, Bradesca said the band is looking to play at Mouse on the Mound and the Bat Lounge in the future. As of now, Bradesca said Cranberry Casket’s next show is this Saturday at the Union.
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