Album Review: In The Vines by Castanets

Review by Gwendolyn Elliott.

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Brooklynite Ray Raposa flirts with the darker side of human emotion; 2005's First Light's Freeze was wintry in its ethos, to say the least. With his third release as Castanets, Raposa emerges on new songs set in the key of fear. In the Vines is a spare, unhurried blend of raw instrumentation and experimental electronic noisemaking serving as a chronicle of crippling depression and death's imminent domain.

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The voice that comes through on Raymond Raposa’s latest LP as Castanets, In The Vines, carries on with an invented tradition. Clearly indebted to predecessors whose names and work the reader is likely thoroughly familiar with, Castanets carves out its place within this tradition not through the isolated, incongruous signifiers that float to the surface on certain tracks (nods to the syrupiest hip hop inform “The Night Is When You Can Not See,” and “And The Swimming”) but through a finely-tuned, deliberate disorientation. The tradition Castanets forms a part of has a dialectical relationship to place.

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