Live Review: Castanets @ The Bell House 11/26/08

Ray Raposa, the only consistent member of Castanets, is too electric to be folk, too eccentric to be alt country, and too mopey to rock. Watching Raposa perform an abbreviated set at The Bell House on Thanksgiving Eve, it’s clear that his Castanets fall somewhere in the musical limbo that confounds critics but sounds fantastic.

Stuck between the overlong set of Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson and the L.A. wankery of El Ten Eleven, Castanets' 30-minute set was the shortest of the night. The band was ostensibly touring in support of their latest record, The City of Refuge, but with the group barely performing any material from the album, it was hard to tell. Instead, Raposa constructed a series of simple, bluesy dirges that drew as much from the dark fringes of Americana as they did from the livelier elements of post rock.

Raposa rarely seemed content with letting his songs come to their natural conclusions, preferring to cut them off with a sharp blast of looped distortion or guitar feedback. At a track’s climax, the bearded frontman would occasionally bend down and yell into a fuzzed-out microphone hidden on stage, letting the feedback punctuate the last note. And for a band that never seemed content with the genre they're borrowing from, it was an unorthodoxly appropriate way to end a song as well as close an enjoyable set.

Related links:
Features: Catching Up With... Castanets
Reviews: Castanets - City of Refuge
News: Castanets visit City of Refuge in October