A dark, mutant-country sound infused with strands of free-jazz and a late-70's Nashville big-radio strut hijacked by post-punk unravelers. The result is a beautiful mix of somber reflection, destination-unknown travelogue, and subversive anti-war boogie. "Freeze" confronts the mythology of war and friendship; the close proximity of things painful and pleasurable, and the complications of this as a paradigm for the world. Castanets suggest artistic geography as transcontinental as Merle Haggard, Albert Ayler, Television, and Richard and Mimi Farina.
Review by Heather Phares
As intense and searching as their first album and even more ambitious, Castanets' First Light's Freeze moves beyond the spiritual crises of Cathedral to work through the difficulties of war and friendship. Even as the group uses some of the same structural techniques from Cathedral, such as the interludes that introduced and punctuated sets of songs, Castanets explore and experiment with their sound in ways that couldn't have been conceived of based on their debut. Though both albums share a similarly charged but quiet, late-night intensity, with different themes come a different sonic palette. Keyboards, saxophones, and tick-tocking drum machines join the subversive country and folk influences of Cathedral for an even more dramatic meeting (and sometimes, collision) of old and new sounds. The terse warning of "Good Friend, Yr Hunger" could easily be older than dirt, but the way "No Voice Was Raised" builds into a frenzy of anguished electronic noise is utterly contemporary. As on Cathedral, Castanets' examination of their given themes isn't especially literal; even when they declare that "the war is on" on "Into the Night," their true feelings come out more through the sound of the music than the words that accompany it. And, despite a few noisy outbursts -- and the wry commentary of "A Song Is Not the Song of the World" -- First Light's Freeze is more sad than angry, particularly on the title track and "Bells Aloud." Indeed, it's the farthest thing from strident and confrontational: sparkling nighttime laments like "All That I Know to Have Changed You" and "Reflecting in the Angles" are purely lovely. However, these songs, and the rest of First Light's Freeze, serve as a reminder that beauty can be a bold form of protest in ugly times.
Castanets
First Light's Freeze
[Asthmatic Kitty; 2005]
Rating: 7.7
"I do not want to explain, and I'm not going to," Raymond Raposa sings on "Dancing With Someone (Privilege of Everything)". He's not just whistling "Dixie", although come to think of it, doing so wouldn't be out of place on First Light's Freeze. Barring a couple of surprisingly lean, poppy tracks, the second Castanets album picks up where the first left off, stringing together disembodied fragments of gothic Americana with brief, freaky interludes. All the hallmarks of the first album are intact-- the E-bowed drones, gusty reverberations, distant chimes, sparse acoustic dirges, and rattling percussion. If the torpid, disarticulated songs often threaten to fall apart completely, the presence of Raposa's quietly commanding voice provides a center, shining through the murk like a strong flashlight submerged in a swamp.
Raposa's skill as a singer and a lyricist are inextricably linked. His voice has a drifting, spectral quality that's perfectly suited to his overlapping images. Like John Ashbery, he's able to sustain pointed ambiguity for the duration of a composition, taking all around the thing without saying it. One of Cathedral's most chilling moments came on "No Light To Be Found (Fare Thee Faith, the Path Is Yours)", with the line, "There was no light to be found in you." Its impact stemmed from the way that Raposa's plaintive voice changed upon its delivery, dropping into an ominous purr, an effect he revives with equal potency on First Light's Freeze's "Bells Aloud" with the line, "Don't it get difficult?". Instead of just hearing about bone-deep weariness, you hear it, as if Raposa can no longer hold the song aloft and lets it slip to the floor.
Raposa's lyrics are also marked by a penchant for litotes, one that's in full force here, which amplifies the album's sense of fatalism and futility. I cannot befriend you true; there is no sweetness to send; no true work to be done; no sure and simple fun that we don't pay for; no song was sung; we were not taught one thing that we could learn. Raposa's a romantic, but too cynical to believe in it, and so instead of singing an ode to his perfect world, he sings an elegy to its absence. "I am not walking with a wife/ She won't be running with the dogs," he intones on "A Song is not the Song of the World", one of two exceptions to the album's diffuse mien. The other is "No Voiced was Raised", yet another negation. Both tracks feature lean click-tracks and crunchy rock embellishments; they're uncommonly kinetic for a Castanets album, but if they're peppier in sound, ultimately, they're just as grim in tone: "No one jailed us," Raposa sings on the latter, "haphazard hearts took no sure stance."
-Brian Howe, October 10, 2005
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