If you remember Castanets from the freak-folk apogee nearly a decade removed, you might wonder whatever happened to Raymond Raposa, the collective’s wonderfully reedy and observational anchor. From 2004 until 2009, Raposa seemed to be one of that loose scene’s most avid explorers. He worked through busted-up cowboy songs and musique concrète hums to create a patchwork empire from blues, folk and country, sewn together with thread drawn of gentle psychedelia.
He kept busy, too, amassing a wide network of collaborators (Sufjan Stevens and Jana Hunter among them) and averaging an album and a split or single a year. While several of his peers, like James Jackson Toth and Phosphorescent’s Matthew Houck, have remained prolific and even reached unforeseen levels of popularity, Raposa all but disappeared after 2009’s middling Texas Rose, the Thaw and The Beasts. After a string of rather monastic solo offerings, he changed his name to Raymond Byron and the White Freighter and recruited a proper rock band to record 2012’s Little Death Shaker. But the new project’s roadhouse grit was mostly a half-measure; Raposa spent a large portion of the record wading through the same sad-bastard penury as Castanets. He’d aimed to turn left and, instead, ambled into little more than a circle around himself.
A decade after the first Castanets LP, Raposa has reprised the name for Decimation Blues, a fragmented 12-song album that trends toward the same path that he already spent five albums exploring. Raposa creeps through “Cub”, his voice careful and a touch tragic when suspended over a slow, halting mix of banjo and piano. “Pour it Tall and Pour it True” is a countrypolitan waltz about anxiety and alcohol, grace by gentle saxophone and whammy-bar guitar. It sparkles beneath its tarnish. There’s a hopeful honky-tonk jangle, and at least one number where Raposa plays the part of a beady-eyed bandit, living life at the lip of violence. A series of geographical and temporal postcards, Decimation Blues is, at times, as beautiful and broken as the best of the Castanets’ catalogue, with songs that shape the confessions of a perennial lamenter into hymns for the mutually benighted.
After a decade with and a departure from Castanets, Raposa still seems to be hamstrung by his own indecision with the project. Castanets always embraced uncertainty by reaching out in the dark for the best new ways to render his old worries. Decimation Blues does that while playing catch-up for the years Castanets missed. Half of the tracks here are inchoate and sometimes embarrassing experiments with beat machines and colorful keyboards; they’re so rudimentary that they lampoon the gravity of Raposa’s words. “Be My Eyes” puts a stuttering techno throb and manic drum fills behind a plea so somber it feels at times like spoken-word deposition. Taking either element seriously, let alone the surf-guitar solo or the indulgent vocals effects, is its own fresh challenge. “My Girl Comes to the City” couples a swaggering beat and a distorted bassline, both of which seem cribbed from Imagine Dragons, with copious vibraslap. Raposa plays the part of the weird, itinerant, musical uncle trying to prove to his niece that he can write a hit song. Maybe this one should have stayed a family secret.
The nebulous moments aren’t without their rewards. Raposa sings above looping, loping saxophone and a barely strummed acoustic guitar during the sublime “Tell Them Memphis,” routing his frail falsetto through something like a vocoder. Sure, it makes him sound a bit like Bon Iver, but more important, it gives this bittersweet farewell to friends a trickle of implied tears, and the effect is transfixing. The shuffling “Out for the West” skips into a jubilant Casio solo at its midpoint, an unlikely shift for an elliptical glimpse at the popular ephemera—Vanity Fair magazine covers and Sean Penn movie roles, Portland Trailblazers overtime victories and old Nike basketball sneakers—that ground our pedestrian narratives. But the move strangely fits the song’s discursive theme, like an allusion to a radio hit Raposa might have heard while buying his kicks at the Value Village in 1994.
Many of Raposa’s fellow freak-folk survivors have found compelling ways to sort through or slough off some of the influences that once made their music so unruly. With Wooden Wand, for instance, Toth has developed multiple backing bands and guises that, last year, helped him move between albums of craggy Crazy Horse jams and inward, abstract folk-rock. Houck has pushed more toward cosmic country and left the shambles of his salad days behind. Hunter has a rock band now, and CocoRosie's doing something like disco. But Raposa remains the wanderer and the tinkerer, with his flirtations webbed only by unease, the battle against it, and his marvelous burl of a voice. Decimation Blues marks the start of Raposa’s second decade in the same wilderness as Castanets, even if he’s now got some new toys for navigation.
