Castanets - Texas Rose, The Thaw & The Beats [Album]

Asthmatic Kitty. Ships in USA 22 Sept, in UK 5 Oct

September 6, 2009, 09:34 AM

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Subverting and subversive, Texas Rose, The Thaw & The Beats starts off pretending to be straight mid western country folk and it almost succeeds.

"It shakes and it splits me - that you could forget me," is the defining line of the opening song 'Rose'. Defining because that's the moment you realise all is not as it appears up there on the placid lake surface. Lovely analogue dusty hiss, tales of the 'bitterest tunes' and the sounds of pretty pipes presage a slow crescendo of clapping, slapping percussive noise helped along by chorus accompaniment that's as plain cracked as it is charming. And all this in just the first song. This is the wheat from which the chaff should rightly be separated.

The band - Castanets - is essentially Raymond Raposa, a San Diego native living in Oregon. It's my loss that I've never heard of him before but I can well believe that this is his most accessible outing, as claimed somewhere in the Asthmatic Kitty blurb. "Texas Rose, The Thaw & The Beats" sounds like the culmination of something, a definite line of development. At times Raposa comes off like Dylan singing Conor Oberst. Maybe Raymond's been drinking that Don't Think Twice mouthwash, "you know it's alright!".

'On Beginning' glistens with shimmery overlays to Raposa's gruff voice and you start to see the psych come floating up more clearly to the surface, running through both this and next track 'My Heart'. "My legs rising out of the mud for you." This is a faster song, urgent even. The writing is as lyrical as writing should be, and is both lovely and beguiling. I kept going back to make sure I'd got the words nailed in the listening, the better to enjoy the effect.

'Worn From The Fight (With Fireworks)' bangs in with rhythmic belting that on first listening, volume cranked high in the car as usual, I thought was fistfuls of gravel on the windscreen. I very literally flinched until eventually my ears worked out that was just a shaker, nothing to be afraid of. Once in though, the songs work more conventionally as songs and are less experimental than you might be expecting. The Hammond Organ sounds and more modern synthesizers add to a strangely comforting mix even where the raw metal ends are on show.

'No Trouble' has Raymond insinuating through the wrong end of a megaphone, this time a more conventional drum sound laces a beautiful woozy electric lead guitar. Feed back noise is used to enhance the lovely moments of quietude. There's enough scratched stretching of steel strings to annoy your high school music teacher, and you could almost get away with playing it when decent folk come for dinner.

Song name of the week is 'We Kept Our Kitchen Clean And Our Dreaming Quiet'. Those words on their own go quite some way towards illuminating the introspection and lucidity that marks out this record. Listen to the track and maybe you'll get what I mean about subversion, de constructing a pleasant straightforward melody and re-building it.

"We stayed in, dodged our friends, did some drugs, and our best to disappear" are lovely words to find in closing track 'Dance Dance', the sadness being that "we all have to dance sometimes to a song that we don't love like we should." It's a fitting end.

I don't want to over blow it and promise the world, but in its own way "Texas Rose, The Thaw & The Beats" is scratching my itch and I'm not afraid to admit it.

Thanks be.

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