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.

CD $12.99

Other people also bought:

Arcade Fire  Funeral , Dungen  Ta Det Lugnt , Animal Collective  Sung Tongs

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 ]

CD $12.99

Other people also bought:

Animal Collective  Feels, Deerhoof  The Runners Four , The Fiery Furnaces  Rehearsing My Choir

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 ]

CD $12.99

Other people also bought:

Megafaun  Gather, Form And Fly, Why?  Eskimo Snow, Girls  Album

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 ]

CD $12.99

Other people also bought:

Six Organs of Admittance  Dark Noontide, Papercuts  Mockingbird, Band Of Horses  Everything All The Time

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 ]

CD $12.99

Other people also bought:

Sons and Daughters  This Gift, The Dutchess & The Duke  She's The Dutchess, He's The Duke, Wilderness  (k)no(w)here