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, Raposa's fi   [ read more ]

MP3 $10.49

Other people also bought:

Monsters of Folk  Monsters Of Folk, Wilco  A ghost is born, El Perro Del Mar  Change Of Heart

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-producer Ero Gr   [ read more ]

MP3 $10.49

Other people also bought:

Last Match  1997 to 1999, Kettel  Smiling Little Cow, Low  Transmission

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 domesticity and t   [ read more ]

MP3 $10.49

Other people also bought:

Camera Obscura  Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi, Octis   Kralls TMUSSS Vol. 2, Karate  In the Fishtank 12

Cathedral, the first nationally released album by San Diego's Castanets, introduces a unique new voice of avant-country. From somber love ballads to haunted tales of frustrated redemption, Cathedral illuminates architecture where faith and doubt clash in an often ambiguous search for the divine.

MP3 $10.49

Other people also bought:

Camera Obscura  Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi, Octis   Kralls TMUSSS Vol. 2, Karate  In the Fishtank 12

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 moments of beauty th   [ read more ]

MP3 $10.49

Other people also bought:

Nautilis  Sketches Vol. 1, Elevator Drops  Lennon's Dead, Neutral Milk Hotel  In the Aeroplane Over the Sea