Music Blogger

Dead Man
Euphoria
(Crusher)

By Will York

The second album by Swedish quartet Dead Man, **Euphoria,** is an unapologetic throwback to the turn of the 1970s – specifically, the transition from ‘60s folk- and psyche-rock to the more sinister hard-rock and proto-metal sounds that would follow. Most of the album is poised right on that brink, and its 11 songs bring to mind everything from early Pink Floyd and Donovan (in his more tolerable moments) to Peter Frampton-era Humble Pie to the softer side of Led Zep or Black Sabbath (think “Planet Caravan”). Impressively, they do so without making me feel like I need to check myself into rehab.

Yes, you can almost smell your burnout uncle’s musty LP collection while listening to this disc, but the songwriting and arrangements are really well done, and the headphone-ready production captures it all with a warmth that’s increasingly rare in this era of Pro Tools.

CASTANETS
City of Refuge
(Asthmatic Kitty)

By Todd Lavoie

I’ve never been to Overton, Nevada – the tiny desert nowhere situated about an hour’s drive northeast of Las Vegas – and frankly, I doubt I ever will. It sounds like a blink-and-you’d-miss-it sort of place. Unincorporated and without a single stoplight, Overton probably doesn’t want any visitors, anyway.

Still, despite the town’s lack of obvious welcome signs along the road, Castanets mastermind Ray Raposa decided that this was the perfect spot to plunk down his roots for a few weeks to record his fourth album, City of Refuge. While driving through town, he must have felt the tug of silence, of complete isolation, and found it too tough to resist – thus temporarily placing his road trip on hiatus, Raposa holed up in a room in a mom-and-pop motel and set out to capture the unforgiving Southwestern landscape in song.

It was an idea which he had been tossing around prior to encountering Overton, but everything began to gel once he’d set up camp in this scrap-of-humanity no one ever visits. He’d found his muse, as unlikely and foreboding as it might be to the rest of us. Having listened rather intently to the latest Castanets offering, I would venture to say that Raposa didn’t merely capture the desert – the desert seems to have captured him as well. Stark, bleak, and jittering from a hushed, teeth-clenched tension from start to finish, City of Refuge is a gripping dispatch from the wobbling point between solitude and madness.