Castanets In The Vines by: Steve Scully Tue:18-Dec-07 Label: Asthmatic Kitty Year: 2007 WB rating 40 out of 100

There was something so profoundly unsettling about First Light’s Freeze, the last album Castanets released, that it was almost impossible to enjoy – its inconsistency in genre, which ranged from odd, up-beat folk to lo-fi, tuneless near-soundscapes being its most blatant failure. But thankfully In The Vines is a step closer to Castanets finding a constant, pervasive ‘voice’, and while Ray Raposa (singer, songwriter and the band’s only constant member) is still ingrained in his own morbid world, he’s slowly allowing his audience in, which is a good thing. 

It’s too easy to draw comparisons between Raposa and his New Folk counterparts. Vocally, Raposa’s nasal drawl is straight from the Banhart guidebook whereas musically he’s more akin to the pre-The Shepherd's Dog Iron and Wine sound: acoustic guitar and vocals being spiced with simple accompaniment. Within this context, however, Raposa takes his own slant on the genre’s paradigm. And while he may exhibit the moroseness that underscores the movement, it’s his willingness – and possibly compulsion – to push this trait to uncertainty and inevitable disaster which differentiates him from the pack. The music itself echoes this, beginning with a sole acoustic guitar to lend backing to Raposa’s voice, this basic premise soon giving way to a chaotic mess of electronic, distorted humming.

The sparseness of the production on ‘This is the Early Game’ is welcome, the slide guitar and banjo lending an evocative, textual presence. The mess of vocals under the main melody, however, does nothing but detract from the effectiveness of the song’s personal message. “I close my eyes/And I see mountains with the longest of roads/Threading through their toes,” Raposa and his choir sing, longing for isolation. The album as a whole was conceived as a voice for the tension between inescapable fate and the perceived freedom of the open road. Pastoral imagery may be littered about In The Vines, but any positivity they may induce is countered immediately by Raposa’s fatal pessimism.
 
There is little-to-no drama to anything Raposa does, ‘Sounded Like a Train, Wasn’t a Train’ is perhaps the most poignant example. Beginning with quiet vocal meanderings, again breaking into a heavily-picked acoustic guitar and an effect-laden Raposa, the song never picks up any pace, and never engages. While album-closer ‘And the Swimming’ counters this trend with its gorgeous swirl of synth underpinning the whispered vocal harmonies, it’s too little, too late. Even Sufjan Stevens, who is a friend and label-mate of Castanets cannot save Raposa, and while anything he touches in his own musical ventures turns to gold, Stevens’ vocal contributions to In The Vines are by no means as reliable. While Stevens prefers lushness, Raposa always errs towards spaciousness and often hollow production, qualities that illuminate neither Stevens nor In The Vines as a whole.

Reversing the trend of his previous record, Ray Raposa has definitely made a more consistent album this time around. Unfortunately, there’s not one moment of melodic incisiveness, nor an element of musical liveliness to be heard. In short, In The Vines is an ordinary, morose and tiresome affair.