Castanets – In The Vines

• 22nd Oct 2007

Castanets third album ‘In The Vines’ is hard listening but the most rewarding as the delicate, emotive words of singer, writer Ray Raposa emerge from a multitude of instruments and backing vocals to hit your heart hard.

‘This Is The Early Game’ is one such beautiful rambler, with some early REM style unidentifiable lyrics that clear to create a song that reflects the madness of modern life. The muddled, dreamy guitars and voices yearn to escape to the wilderness of somewhere, anywhere but here. “Let me live, out there where it all is, let me go…thinking on yesterday’s ghost, it’s been a ghostly day…I close my eyes, and I see mountains with the longest of roads…” So Raposa isn’t made for these times then, and ‘In The Vines’ was completed soon after he had been mugged in Brooklyn following a year of depression; something which makes the album’s earnest intimacy all the more understandable. Despite the heavy darkness shrouding much of the album it is one which relishes the moments of perfection in life and the belief that however bad things get there is always hope for the future. For Raposa the music is everything, but it feels as though this man would be as happy back on the road without a worry, faking Greyhound bus passes again – he himself says there is “definite rootlessness” a fear of the spaces between the journeys.

You must hear this album. Much is stunning, some simply hard listening; you wonder where it is heading and you’re constantly twitching by the remote before some gorgeous turn of events wins over. When Castanets climb from the stereo you are instantly hit by a Tom Waits comparison. The deep, croaking, pained but somehow perfect voice of Ray Raposa is a more complex beast than Waits though and the alt-folk movement is there as clear as Castanets soaring electric guitars. Sufjan Stevens among many others have toured with this ever changing collaborative but it is Devandra Banhart who is as close as you can come, the sound and spirit of the two men and their otherworldly attitudes are certainly in harmony. Banhart’s music is that bit more uptempo and obvious though while Raposa has the more affecting voice and is more than worthy of equalling Banhart’s success. Would that make him happy? Probably not. The man is as complex as this album is to unravel but it is more than worth the effort.