Pitchfork

"I do not want to explain, and I'm not going to," Raymond Raposa sings on "Dancing With Someone (Privilege of Everything)". He's not just whistling "Dixie", although come to think of it, doing so wouldn't be out of place on First Light's Freeze. Barring a couple of surprisingly lean, poppy tracks, the second Castanets album picks up where the first left off, stringing together disembodied fragments of gothic Americana with brief, freaky interludes. All the hallmarks of the first album are intact-- the E-bowed drones, gusty reverberations, distant chimes, sparse acoustic dirges, and rattling percussion. If the torpid, disarticulated songs often threaten to fall apart completely, the presence of Raposa's quietly commanding voice provides a center, shining through the murk like a strong flashlight submerged in a swamp.

Raposa's skill as a singer and a lyricist are inextricably linked. His voice has a drifting, spectral quality that's perfectly suited to his overlapping images. Like John Ashbery, he's able to sustain pointed ambiguity for the duration of a composition, taking all around the thing without saying it. One of Cathedral's most chilling moments came on "No Light To Be Found (Fare Thee Faith, the Path Is Yours)", with the line, "There was no light to be found in you." Its impact stemmed from the way that Raposa's plaintive voice changed upon its delivery, dropping into an ominous purr, an effect he revives with equal potency on First Light's Freeze's "Bells Aloud" with the line, "Don't it get difficult?". Instead of just hearing about bone-deep weariness, you hear it, as if Raposa can no longer hold the song aloft and lets it slip to the floor.

Raposa's lyrics are also marked by a penchant for litotes, one that's in full force here, which amplifies the album's sense of fatalism and futility. I cannot befriend you true; there is no sweetness to send; no true work to be done; no sure and simple fun that we don't pay for; no song was sung; we were not taught one thing that we could learn. Raposa's a romantic, but too cynical to believe in it, and so instead of singing an ode to his perfect world, he sings an elegy to its absence. "I am not walking with a wife/ She won't be running with the dogs," he intones on "A Song is not the Song of the World", one of two exceptions to the album's diffuse mien. The other is "No Voiced was Raised", yet another negation. Both tracks feature lean click-tracks and crunchy rock embellishments; they're uncommonly kinetic for a Castanets album, but if they're peppier in sound, ultimately, they're just as grim in tone: "No one jailed us," Raposa sings on the latter, "haphazard hearts took no sure stance."