VINYL FORMAT. With First Light's Freeze, Castanets return with a dark mutant-country sound infused with strands of free-jazz and a late-seventies Nashville big-radio strut hijacked by post-post-punk unravelers. The result is a beautiful mix of somber reflection, destination-unknown travelogue, and subversive anti-war boogie. Castanets' unrelenting creative pioneering delightfully befuddles, as they simultaneously honor and dismantle "New Americana". While Cathedral explored the themes of domes   [ read more ]

LP $12.99

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VINYL FORMAT. With Texas Rose, The Thaw and the Beasts , Castanets' Raymond Raposa keeps one foot in the rustic country, folk, and blues of past records while taking it - everything - to the next level. Straddling the line between "out" and accessible, the Rafter Roberts-produced Texas Rose is a full-band affair, a bent noise-country terrain of dissolving interludes and spaced-out electronic pop tracks up against songs that wouldn't be out of place on a Merle or Willie record. Texas Rose[ read more ]

LP $13.99

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VINYL FORMAT. Originally released in 2004, this was the debut by a unique voice of avant-country, San Diego's Castanets. Backed by haunting, angelic voices and recorded mostly in a secluded cabin in the northern California woodlands, Cathedral illuminates the dark architecture where faith and doubt clash in an often ambiguous search for the divine. Castanets create music that is epic and inspiring. From somber love ballads to haunted tales of frustrated redemption, the delivery is potent and devoid o   [ read more ]

LP $11.99

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VINYL FORMAT. This limited edition 7" includes a remix of "Strong Animal" from Castanets recent In the Vines full-player, as well as "Golden," an outtake from that same album. The remix was part of a series of remixes given out via the interweb to help promote In The Vines. This one was too deliciously geared for dance floors so we felt that not putting it to wax was a crime to the night. West Coaster and Hero to All, Rafter, manned boards and faders and clickers for it. Bass up, mids wherever   [ read more ]

7" $4.40

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VINYL FORMAT. Ray Raposa had nearly finished this follow-up to 2005's First Light's Freeze when he was mugged at gunpoint outside his Brooklyn home. This climaxed a year of depression and nomadic, nocturnal dislocation for him. Appropriately, the album is based on a Hindu fable about being trapped in an inescapable fate, with death and the limitations of our physical lives closing in from all corners. But it isn't all darkness and peril; there's a strange sense of hope and delight in the brief moment   [ read more ]

LP $11.99

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VINYL FORMAT. An uneasy, asymmetric weave of sung songs, chants, electronic noise solos, and spaghetti western guitar interludes. City Of Refuge suggests a film soundtrack; a narrative propelled by yearning, passion, dislocation, ambiguity, regret, redemption, cryptic symbolism, and other art film obligatories. This is not just music but emotional catharsis. Guest appearances by Jana Hunter, Sufjan Stevens, Dawn Smithson (Jessamine, Sunn O))))), Scot Tuma (Souled American, Boxhead Ensemble), and co-p   [ read more ]

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