PLOT THE THREE current home bases of Castanets nomadic mastermind Ray Raposa—his native San Diego, his adopted home of Brooklyn and present recording outpost of Portland, Ore.—and you’ll punch a push pin into a vast, cartographic stretch of the U.S. heartland. Skew that determined midpoint in the same manner that Raposa has consistently skewed fretbased folk, faith-laced hymns or whiskey-faced Americana and you’ll reposition your mapped coordinate a good thousand miles west, to the spooky, barren stretches of our nation’s Southwestern desert.
It was in that oppressive environment that Raposa, alone in the stoplight-absent town of Overton, Nev., worked in isolation for several weeks crafting his latest record, City Of Refuge, in a rented motel room. And I’d be reluctant to repeat that fact, emphasized as it is in the press release that accompanied the disc, if, goddamn it, the album didn’t sound exactly like it was. Raposa, no stranger to fusing his freakfolk with dissonance, noise or near-emptiness, is at his logical conclusion on Refuge.
All his signature elements are incorporated, but the spare, hushed nature of his work is intensified. “Prettiest Chain” is the first proper song on the album, a piece of elegantly breathing-out, six-string twang overlaid with terse lyrics that precisely double the electric’s lines, but it takes three instrumental lead-in tracks, totaling just over five minutes, to get there: “Celestial Shore” is an introductory baptism via a snippet of Sunday Morning repentance melody forced through a buzzy guitar amp; “High Plain 1” follows, fiddling with echoing octaves from an unidentified source that scantly sounds man made; and then the previous guitar reemerges for “The Destroyer,” this time giving us foreboding Spaghetti Western figures.
After “Chain,” Raposa comes slow strutting with another vocal number, this time giving us the almost title track “Refuge 1,” a slow-building guitar pluck underlying the sole lyric, much repeated: “I’m gonna run to the City Of Refuge.”The shaky singer, jumping up an octave mid-way, exhales his escape plan as though it were a dirge.
Castanets songs have always felt, however rendered, like laments, though—from the banjo pluck of “Good Friend,Yr Hunger” off 2005’s First Light’s Freeze, with creepily abstract promises from Raposa not to be “a hungry ghost,” to the percussively ominous (particularly noteworthy since City Of Refuge is drum free) “Strong Animal” from last year’s In The Vines, where a woman is regarded for “her horns and her hide.” In being both Castanets’ sparsest and loneliest album, City furthers Raposa’s obsession not only with places but also with coming to and leaving them. He dreams of ideal locales that turn out to be desolated outliers, effectively conjuring emotion with crucial details. I don’t know why the storyteller, in “Glory B,” says he “threw [his] shirt out the window onto the road,” but it is a prime instance of the evocative images Raposa employs, not coincidentally telling a story whose first detail concerns a man heading down a highway.
Where can we travel to next? City Of Refuge’s closing number, “After The Fall,” considers the plight of those expelled from The Garden of Eden so plainly, with chords so achingly familiar, that when I first heard it I assumed it was the work of seminal song-poet Leonard Cohen. “Eve began slowly to dress/ Adam just stared at the wall,” Raposa begins, describing a moment of mythical human history so vividly that I am forced to reconsider the veracity of the Bible. It’s new territory for Castanets, not the impressionistic, narrativeimplied tale that is Raposa’s handy standby.
The song then slyly morphs into a firstperson narrative, Raposa’s creaky vocals recounting a time he saw a woman in a photograph before lamenting his general displacement: “If I had known where we were going/ I would not have gone at all,” he sings.
It’s hard for me to imagine somewhere Raposa wouldn’t go, his songs and his person always conveying geography as much as anything else. Father-of-Humanity Adam may have once been, accordingly to lore, literally naked; but here, for less than three minutes, Raposa is emotionally unclothed, exploring yet another back road he has only started to travel
