Castanets - In The Vines (Asthmatic Kitty)
4/5
By: Liam Manley
My great-uncle Matty was mugged walking home one night, but he didn't make a country album about it. Perhaps if he had he wouldn't have spent his remaining years drinking a bottle of Powers whiskey a day to get over it.
Something similar happened to Castanets figurehead Ray Raposa; his mugging at gunpoint outside his Brooklyn home, following a year of crippling depression, resulted in not only the loss of that month's rent money but also, one can only imagine, his already fragile sense of security.
Much like Alan Partridge said: 'I want to understand man's inhumanity to man. And then make a TV programme about it', what draws us to be entertained by the suffering of others? Is it a desire to connect, a need for emotional engagement? Or is it merely schadenfreude?
In the Vines takes its name from a Hindu fable 'The Well Of Life', which tells of a Brahman lost halfway down a pit, entangled in vines, with a six-faced elephant at the top and a serpent waiting below, leaving him with very little choice but stay put. The man's only relief is the honey he gorges on from the pit's bee hives, even as rats gnaw away at the vines that keep him suspended. This neatly encapsulates the sense of brief glimpses of comfort amidst despair that permeates throughout this record.
Though the songs are framed by typical country conceits of mellow strums and whispers of pedal steel backing first-person narratives of far-off places and the long-gone women waiting there, Raposa has added ricochets of feedback and static that lay testament to a recently confessed fondness for German electronica pioneers Harmonia.
Opener 'Rain Will Come' brings to mind a prairie version of Travis Bickle, though more concerned with impending redemption than the cleansing of skunk pussies and jism monkeys, regardless of the rising squalls of dissonance that fill the final quarter of the song. Although sharing a fondness for dosing trad-country with dashes of avant-noise, the only time Castanets resembles Wilco is on the less atypical tracks like 'Westbound Blue', calling to mind the sound of Tweedy & Co's opus 'Being There'. Aside from the sonic diversions and obstacles, another thing that may jar is Raposa's nasal vocal, which is somewhat akin to a dust-blown Peter Perrett.
As haunted as it is haunting and distraught as it is distressing, the motifs of dislocation and longing echo throughout In The Vines, just as the feeling of the slightest slivers of hope that crack through its isolated atmosphere, it's not entirely bereft of optimism. Far from giving in and succumbing to an inevitable fate, Raposa seems inclined towards the rediscovery of security, this being an exploration to carve out a new safety zone for himself.
It's these moments of hope and vulnerability in among the wreckage that draw us to record like these, making us, thankfully, not just sick perverts after all.
Stream 'This Is The Early Game' from 'In The Vines' HERE.
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