Castanets' Raymond Raposa has never shied from mortality. His folk-electronic hybrids have often romanticized death, which isn't the same thing as honoring it. But for City of Refuge-- which is really no city at all-- Raposa decamped, alone, to a tiny desert outpost in Nevada, away from Brooklyn, away from social interaction. The resulting album is appropriately barren and full of spirits. You can tell Raposa was scoured clean by the desert: This is his most nakedly honest record.
But here's the thing about deeply personal artifacts: Sometimes, they don't communicate. To investigate yourself through music without regard for audience is very worthwhile. But such an artifact can fit strangely into the commerce stream, where different imperatives apply, and where City of Refuge now resides. When I listen to it, I find myself feeling glad for Raposa that he made it, while wondering what I'm supposed to do with it. He's speaking to himself in a code so deep and personal it scans as almost autistic. Hearing it feels more like voyeurism than dialogue.
City of Refuge hangs together oddly-- in fact, it barely hangs together at all. Stern electronic set pieces, high-desert guitar arrangements, and morose folk songs intermingle without discernible rhyme or reason. As a result, the album fits no particular mood, hobbled by awkward pacing. It contains a number of admirable tracks, but its packaging and sale as an album is problematic. The overdubbed cameos from Sufjan Stevens, Jana Hunter, and others add a sheen of completion, but fail to bind it together. It works best in small doses, and might have been more sensibly released as individual tracks via the Internet.
The most interesting tracks are the simplest ones. Guitar overture "Celestial Shore" sounds like the national anthem of some sad, dusty country. "High Plain 1" sends scraps of delayed guitar ricocheting off the walls. "The Destroyer" is a seductive dirge for reverbed arpeggios and wobbly percussion. But sequenced consecutively, these three compelling tracks just seem erratic, especially when they let out into more run-of-the-mill Castanets tracks ("Prettiest Chain" and "Refuge 1") where Raposa's voice, distant and brassy as always, finally appears. Elsewhere, a work of purely abstract interference ("High Plain 3") sits next to an earnest cover of the hymn "I'll Fly Away"; a psychedelic guitar jam ("The Quiet") next to a simple acoustic tune ("Glory B").
City of Refuge seems more like a collection of ideas for three or four different albums than one complete work. I find Raposa's electronic improvisations more interesting than his songs, and would love to hear an album where he explores them more fully. And maybe Raposa is primed to make something more focused, having gotten this lost diary disguised as a record-- sometimes intriguing, sometimes banal, often incomprehensible-- out of his system.
