Castanets
In The Vines
Asthmatic Kitty
The follow up to 2005's First Light's Freeze is a desolate walk through the fear ridden caverns of Ray Raposa's thoughts. 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 In The Vines is a claustrophobic experience yet strangely rewarding.
The claustrophobia comes from Raposa's intimate delivery. Castanets is pretty much a solo project but various session guests are drafted in. Despite this it is Raposa who dominates this sound with his hard-edged voice spinning sinister tales with gothic doom and paranoia. Musically it's about as sparse as the front cover might suggest. The two fragile stalks stand alone in a murky nothingness conjuring perfectly the feeling of this music. Raposa has always led us down an unnerving back alley but In The Vines is a journey where the end is predetermined and as he sings on the opening Rain Will Come "So it's going to be sad and it's going to be long."
But there are moments of beauty to the light the way here like the floaty guitar work on The Night Is When You Can Not See that builds to an ever so slight crescendo. There is quite often harmony vocals that suggest that we've got friends somewhere nearby which really serves as a comfort when feeling helplessly through Raposa's all-encompassing dark.
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7th Nov 2007 - Tumblr
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