Castanets - In The Vines

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Sello: Asthmatic Kitty
Estilo: Indie Folk, Indie Rock
Para fans de: Vetiver, Akron/Family, Devedra Banhart, Califone, Six Organs Of Admittance, Espers...

Tracklist
1. Rain Will Come
2. This Is The Early Game
3. Westbound, Blue
4. Strong Animal
5. Sway
6. The Fields Crack
7. Three Months Paid
8. The Night Is When You Can Not See
9. Sounded Like a Train, Wasn't a Train
10. And The Swimming

THE STORY
Ray Raposa of Castanets had almost finished his follow-up to First Light's Freeze (2005) when three men in strange masks mugged him at gunpoint in front of his home in Bedstuy, Brooklyn. Stealing Raposa's rent money, iPod and security, the three thieves climaxed a year of depression and nomadic, nocturnal dislocation. Not long after the mugging, Raposa completed In The Vines.

If the Castanets' debut, Cathedral (2004) was a road narrative and First Light's Freeze a malaise of longing, In The Vines is an attempt to reconcile the fear of the spaces between the journeys. Says Raposa, "There is a definite rootlessness. Not so much pursuit as just waking up somewhere else, then somewhere else again. I have had to halt production and/or writing and/or thinking about this album repeatedly due to actual, incapacitating depressions. Totally crippling. The bad kind. Off of the road, it's been a pretty bad year."

Appropriately, the album he was struggling to complete is based on a Hindu fable about being trapped in an inescapable fate, with death and the limitations of our physical lives closing in from all corners. The story is half of the inspiration for In The Vines. The other half is the wandering that's typified most of Raposa's life. From years on the road faking Greyhound passes, to moving to the Virgin Islands as a parentless teenaged professional surfer, to keeping tabs on expatriate journalist parents (father residing in Saudi Arabia and mother in Mexico), Raposa's life has been one of back seats and rest stops. In the fable story, "The Well of Life", a giant net stretched out by a giant woman surrounds a Brahman lost in the forest. The frantic Brahman runs in circles attempting to escape until he falls halfway down a pit and is entangled in vines. He discovers some bee hives halfway between the flesh-hungry six-faced elephant at the top of the pit and the waiting serpent at the bottom. As bees buzz around the Brahman and rats gnaw at the vines holding him up, all he can do is gorge on the sweet honey.

Heavy stuff, yes, but it isn't all peril, and darkness. The songs are sung with such intimacy and earnestness that In The Vines "sways" somewhere between the serpent, elephant, bees and rats, the honey representing a strange sense of hope and delight in the brief moments of beauty that sustain our lives.

THE SOUND
There is community within the music of Castanets, one that keeps Raposa safe and sane while dangling in the pit. In this instance we have near-shipwreck-mate Jana Hunter, Nonhorse (Vanishing Voice), Rafter Roberts, Nathan Delffs (Shaky Hands), Viking Moses, and Matthew Houck (Phosphorescent). Recently the live Castanets' community has included such folks as good friend and labelmate Sufjan Stevens, Nick Delffs (Shaky Hands), Rob Lowe (Lichens) and Annie Clark (St. Vincent).

This ever shifting cast makes it is necessary to drop preconceived notions about "bands" and "singer-songwriters" when approaching the Castanets. Castanets is always a "we," no matter if Raposa plays alone or with dozens. This collaborative effort spawns a paradoxical sound indebted to both AM Gold and the idiosyncratic fringes of music theory. He mines both to reveal treasures. The template may be country music, but the collective energy conjures up elements of noise, free jazz, black metal and electronic abstractions. "Following up a Kitty Wells cassette in the van with a Brotzmann disc or a Lichens disc or Hot 97” says Raposa.

The album is a snapshot of an extended period of intense work, devoid of live audience but blessed by the detritus of players, city, country, ghost audiences, and improvisations of water, smoke and night. Raposa is the curator of his own art, seeking out potential collaborations to infuse the situation with multiple colors, subdue his ego-rule, and unearth the song's own personality. Raposa plays music with folks as an extension of enjoying and eating the honey.

Spokane - Little Hours

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Sello: Jagjaguwar
Estilo: Slowcore, Sadcore, Indie-rock
Para fans de: Ida, Low, Gregor Samsa, Early Day Miners

Tracklist
Singing
Minor Careers
If There Is Hope, It Lies In The Proles
Thankless Marriage
Building
Middle School
Addendum
These Things
Leases & Promises
Tell Me

Little Hours is the patient sheen of stillness after a short, violent burst of intention. The lingering, resonant decay of a nail being hammered into wood. A piano laden marriage of small hopes and quiet violence.

In Church Hill, a borough of Richmond, Virginia, there is a small yellow cottage. Next to the cottage is an austere replica of a mid-nineteenth century, white Federal period house. The members of Spokane hand built the structure over the course of 2006 while recording and revising their first new album in four years, Little Hours. The record is both a document of and an aural parallel to that difficult, meticulous process. In the emotional vein of folk singer Jackson C. Frank with the textural emaciation of composers Zbigniew Preisner and Morton Feldman, the songs themselves are hinged on concepts of failure and stillborn ideas, on the conflicted process of building or birthing a cerebral image into the world. There are the echoes of insistent cats running through the skeletal frame of the house, pillaged, infant birds in their mouths, left half-dead at the foot of the hole where the stair would be. The brutal gutting of the earth to build a foundation wall of concrete and brick, by sheer will and intent and arrogance. There is the crude muscling of lifted walls that block out the sun and obscure the trees. And the thought of future inhabitants, laughing and arguing and sitting, each alone, the ghosts of these songs wilting and remnant in the air.

Little Hours is packaged in a vinyl sleeve with both record and CD inside, 50 of which are handmade and numbered. It features the core ensemble of 2003's Measurement, which MOJO magazine called "a uniquely enthralling treasure", along with contributions from members of Brooklyn's orchestral, minimalist band Gregor Samsa.

Magnolia Electric Co. - Sojourner Box Set

Descargar Nasville Moon
Descargar The Black Ram
Descargar Sun Session EP
Descargar Shohola

Sello: Secretly Canadian
Estilo: Alt-country, Indie-rock, Folk
Para fans de: Wilco, M. Ward, Bonnie Prince Billy, Okkervil River, Calexico, Smog, Damien Jurado

Disc 1: Nashville Moon

1 Lonesome Valley
2 Montgomery
3 Don't Fade on Me
4 Hammer Down
5 No Moon on the Water
6 Nashville Moon
7 What Comes After the Blues
8 Don't This Look Like the Dark
9 North Star
10 Bowery
11 Texas 71
12 Down the Wrong Road Both Ways

Disc 2: The Black Ram

1 In the Human World
2 The Black Ram
3 What's Broken Becomes Better
4 Will-O-The-Wisp
5 Kanawha
6 A Little at a Time
7 Blackbird
8 And the Moon Hits the Water
9 The Old Horizon

Disc 3: Sun Sessions

1 Talk to Me Devil, Again
2 Memphis Moon
3 Hold on Magnolia
4 Trouble in Mind

Disc 4: Shohola

1 Steady Now
2 Spanish Moon Fall & Rise
3 Night Country
4 Shiloh Temple Bell
5 The Spell
6 Take One Thing Along
7 The Lamb's Song
8 Roll the Wheel

Magnolia Electric Co.'s Sojourner is a kind of "love for the fans" offering. It comes encased in a wooden box, with a sliding top, with the band's logo imprinted on the front. Inside are four different CDs, containing four different sessions (and corresponding postcards), recorded in as many different places with four different lineups. There is also a short DVD documenting the band's 2005's Canadian tour in 2005, by Todd Chandler, Tim Sutton, and Ava Berfkovsky. There is a folded poster as well. Inside a small black velveteen pouch there is a pewter medallion with the band's logo engraved on it. It's a memento mori of a time spent traveling through these songs with the journeyman guide. It is limited to 5,000 copies and is available from the band's label, Secretly Canadian, for $37 postpaid. Some of the material on the four recorded discs -- three albums (entitled Nashville Moon, Shohola, and Black Ram) and an EP, Sun Session (recorded at Sun Studios in Memphis) -- has appeared elsewhere before. That said, many songs are here in very different incarnations, recorded, re-recorded, or demoed by Jason Molina himself. But this is no mere odds-and-sods collection. In fact, it feels like Molina must be exhausted, by being so prolific.

Fading Trails, released in September of 2006, contained nine of the songs from these different sessions, giving it its rather schizophrenic character. Nashville Moon was recorded with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio in Chicago. It contains 12 cuts, and only "Lonesome Valley," "Montgomery," and "Don't Fade on Me" were included on Fading Trails. This is a full-band set, with Molina accompanied by six other musicians including Jason Evans Groth on lead guitar, Mark Rice on drums, Michael Kapinus on keyboards, Jonathan Cargill on backing vocals, Mike Brenner on lap steel, and bassist Pete Schreiner. Given its title, this is the most "country" set in the box. But Molina's country music is more haunted than hunted. Some of these tunes, like "Hammer Down" and "North Star," appeared on What Comes After the Blues but in radically different, stripped-down versions. They feel more like road songs performed in a smoky barroom than late-night back-porch confessionals. These full-on band treatments add heft and dimension, and underscore them somehow as "definitive."

The Sun Session EP, just over 15 minutes in length, was recorded in a single day while the group was on tour in 2006. The band received payment in studio hours from the venue that hosted them. "Memphis Moon" and "Talk to Me Devil Again" were issued on Fading Trails, but the other two tracks, "Hold on Magnolia" and the band's reading of the traditional "Trouble in Mind," are new. Shohola contains eight cuts with Molina accompanying himself on a guitar. Nothing more. It is the spookiest of the four recordings for sure. While the What Comes After the Blues album may have been spectral in its minimal approach, this set feels positively skeletal. Again, the hints were on Fading Trails in "Steady Now" and "Spanish Moon Fall and Rise," but they only lower the shroud. A slow, lonesome guitar frames Molina's sense of desolation in the lyrics of "Night Country" -- "I have to live this way/Be the builder of no house/Oh lone pine on the fading trails/I join you now/The night country comes...." This disc is only 25 minutes long, but any more would be oppressive.

The final album in the set -- or first depending on the way you decide to listen to them -- is Black Ram, another full ensemble set with David Lowery, Andrew Bird, Molly Blackbird, Rick Alverson, and Miguel Urbitzondo. It begins mournfully with the slow, meandering 4/4 of "In the Human World," but the mix swells even as the tempo continues to drag. The refrain empties out into a wave of Mellotron and harmonium, as guitars unwind. And just as it all becomes nearly full-bodied, the tune just ends. Each tune has a way of beginning with less than it closes. The title track commences as a mutant blues with tinny acoustic guitars, but almost as soon as Molina opens his mouth with his strange incantatory chant, referring to both a person and the person's reflection in the natural countryside, eerie sounds, electric guitars, and reverb envelope it. It's all so disembodied it can barely be called a song. Black Ram is the place where this collection should either begin or end. It doesn't belong in the middle because it's the most physical of the four discs, and because there's at least the determination to find resolve, even if it ends in a kind of lyrical, philosophical, and first-person failure. In other words, the same spirits who have dogged Molina on every previous recording are still here, shape-shifting to meet his every challenge. There's nothing left to do but welcome them in. Sojourner is an aptly titled monolith, one that invites fans of Magnolia Electric Co. with a "thank you for believing," even as it urges them to take in more of the picture than ever before.