Standing on the floor of a charcoal-tinged rock club last March, Raymond Raposa was close enough for one to count the hairs on his beard, but still distant enough that I could barely discern his unamplified utterances amid townie peripheral conversations. The Castanets’ lone constant member, his acoustic guitar, and a tambourine-toting female accompanist eked out five skeletons of songs to an indifferent audience, baffling the forty or so folks who had ridden the crest of webzine hype into the venue with bare-bone remnants of tunes from the then-recent Cathedral. It wasn’t a concert for the scrapbook, not a quirky before-they-made-it anecdote to impress future generations; instead, it was an anti-spectacle—neither vociferously subversive nor nervously defensive. The show was a parody of the popular myth of small venue intimacy in which the mercurial pop artist lets down his guard so quickly and completely that his charisma goes with it.

             One concertgoer, Helen Smith, expressed a bewilderment probably shared by many: “I remember walking in and seeing this guy in the middle of the floor kind of talking and kind of singing, and for a few songs I kept wondering when Castanets was going to come on. I honestly didn't realize that I had just seen Castanets. I felt really confused and awkward, like I was watching someone embarrass themselves, but I had to make sure I didn't let on to them that I thought it was embarrassing.”

             It’s an understandable reaction. There was never the sense that we had to struggle to reach a level of communion with Raposa, and in his overeagerness to grant it to us, it was easy to grow diffident with him—he was just a normal guy, a normal guy whom we could talk over, shift our gaze away from, and generally treat like the panhandlers waiting to detain us outside the venue.

             We felt like Neil Young fans must have felt during the Rust Never Sleeps tour, when they packed arenas expecting to hear lavish renditions of AM radio blockbusters like “Comes a Time” and “Heart of Gold,” but were instead subjected to a puzzling cross-section of searing new tunes like “Sedan Delivery.” Raposa’s polar extremes, like Young’s, don’t seem connected to the same universe, let alone the same brain. This sort of duplicity can be dizzying, but its effects were compounded that evening by the fact that all anyone there seemed to know of Castanets was narrative kitchen-sink indie-rock, and that schema didn’t accommodate this lonely man voodoo.

             The more Castanets reveals itself, the less disparate listening experiences look like slippages, and the more they appear to be distant points in a vast but fully-formed constellation. Popmatters reviewer Zach Adcock witnessed Raposa wreak an entirely different sort of havoc on his listeners’ expectations when his songs tesseracted into a quagmire of drone during an Urbana performance last June. Despite differences in form and style, the rearranged Cathedral tunes had an effect similar to the one I encountered during my first Castanets experience, leaving a number of attendees, as Adcock writes in his show recap, “put off” that it wasn’t the “normal, Saturday night drinking music” that they “seemed to expect.” In the live setting, Raposa seems primarily interested in achieving the same end out of different means, and if we can’t see that his old motifs are using their new wings to fly towards the same sun, well, fuck us for keeping our nose too close to the page.

             One of Raposa’s tour-mates and collaborators, Chris Schlarb of Xn., I Heart Lung, and Create (!), had initial difficulty mapping out the collective’s malleable vision. While Raposa was quick to latch onto Schlarb as a kindred spirit, Schlarb had to give the Castanets’ music time to ferment before he felt the same. “Honestly,” he told me, “it took me a little longer to get into what the Castanets were doing.” He’s quick to add, though, that taking the time to wrap our heads around this music reaps dividends, noting that he “got hooked, hard” once the aesthetic clicked with him.

             For anyone who felt alienated in Cathedral’s de-familiarizing wake, Castanets’ second full-length for Asthmatic Kitty attempts to reconcile the group’s contrasting sensibilities while adding even more complications into the mix; it might very well hook the skeptics. First Light’s Freeze is a much less disorienting assertion of Castanets’ artistic project. At first it seems completely removed from the imploded live sketches of Cathedral, countering their withdrawn rusticity and transcendental swirl with a much cozier style of Americana, all gussied up with heart-melting reverb. I feel the disconnect most on “All That I Know to Have Changed in You,” a lilting comedown that wades through shimmering pitch bends more adeptly than the best Mojave 3 songs.

             But the difference is really ubiquitous, as even the most minuscule adornments in the most inconsequential segue tracks add to a smooth, rounded surface that begs to befriend and be shared with as many listeners as possible. Cathedral’s minutiae distracted as much as they embellished (i.e. the jittering toy box percussion in “You Are the Blood”), but Raposa’s latest offering revels in the fact that it is a well-wrought construct intended for presentation and consumption. First Light’s Freeze always seems to be aware of its listenership, and its shorn aesthetic can greet us with nothing other than open arms.

             To lazy ears, First Light’s Freeze might sound a notch too personable, like a tentative step towards a neutered, cookie-cutter sound, but if we make this hasty assessment, we’re turning a blind eye to the way in which the Castanets continually reinterprets and reinvents itself through these thirteen songs. As the group’s concerts have demonstrated, Castanets’ songs aren’t stable bodies, but rather mutable forms primed for recontextualization; they might not open themselves up for adventurous solos or improvisation in the way that jazz compositions do, but neither their spiritual nor sonic fiber can be broken down into one or two essential elements.

             The reason is that the Castanets adhere staunchly to the most liberated of aesthetic sensibilities, in which drones and drum machines, squawking saxes and lulling glockenspiels, and the personal and the political all have equal communicative cachet. When I asked Schlarb how the project reconciles pop and the avant-garde, he bristled at the notion of such distinctions even existing in the first place.

             “Well, it’s all the same thing really, isn’t it? They’re both ways of communicating and telling a story. Some people just take more chances than others.”

             While such assertions are often facile—refer to Ornette Coleman’s bold declaration in his Body Meta liner notes that his Prime Time ensemble was equipped to tackle “all forms that can, or could exist yesterday, today, or tomorrow,” or listen to some unshowered, dreadlocked college town cling-on wax pseudo-philosophical about how his band’s jazz-dub-funk-psych-disco-bluegrass gumbo works because “it’s all music, maaaan”—the Castanets’ latest slew of songs convincingly flesh out Schlarb's ethos in a way that previous recorded material couldn't.

             “Reflecting in the Angles,” a track that originated during a two-day December 2004 jam session between Create (!) and Raposa, illustrates just how infrequently questions of style and genre inhibit First Light’s Freeze. To casual listeners, the song might seem like little more than a negligible instrumental coda, but it plays more like a succinct benediction upon closer inspection. Instruments reveal themselves slowly, like the ghosts of the 1918 White Sox stepping out of the cornstalks in Field of Dreams: crystalline guitar notes ring out at first; next, rustling cymbals paint the corners a Sunny Murray hue as a feistier second guitar bears its teeth and growls; then, a squibbling horn peers around the bend and quickly adds another defiant voice to the conversation. For a few seconds, the ensemble appears poised to swell and crash like a tsunami, but they opt to instead fizzle out into a post-shoegaze wash.

             While pop music discipline ultimately quells the players’ wildness, it does so sympathetically, suggesting that the gulf between a free jazz inferno and a Fennesz-ian pastoral can be bridged gracefully and logically in a matter of seconds. And there’s a good chance the song could’ve easily been the former on a different recording—Schlarb claims that the rough cut is “drastically different” from the album version.

             Even in seemingly arbitrary moments, Castanets present us with sounds capable of leading any number of alternate lives. There’s more at stake in “Reflecting in the Angles,” however, than just formal and stylistic harmony. The track’s pervading sheen serves as one of many instances in which Raposa attempts to distance his aesthetic from that of the New Weird American acts to which Castanets has often been compared. “I think Ray was perhaps rebelling against the folk thing a bit,” Schlarb remarked, noting that the sessions from which Create (!)’s collaborations were culled were “acoustic based, [while] the album versions were awash in synths and keys and digital reverb and things.”

             And though Castanets’ kinship with groups like the No-Neck Blues Band and Six Organs of Admittance has always been dubious at best, First Light’s Freeze does seem to go out of its way to render such comparisons irrelevant. Whereas freak-folk pivots on the contrast between nativistic, earthy styles and spectral, freewheeling forms, Raposa’s music is more dynamic, juxtaposing the intimate, bare, and still with the spectacular, ornamented, and explosive. Like My Morning Jacket or late-career Elliott Smith, Castanets oscillates between the most vulnerable of private spaces and the most contrived public exhibitions. The group sees as much possibility for exploration in tight structures and synthetic textures as it does in wide-open jams and organic sounds.

             This is a key distinction with ramifications beyond altering RIYLs on a one-sheet. The Castanets’ holistic outlook differs from psych-folk’s “gates-wide-open fusion” (to crib a phrase from Simon Reynolds), in that it casts its net much wider and further out, to the point that it’s difficult to accept a folky rambler, like “Good Friend, Yr Hunger,” a Modest Mouse-esque, click-track backed looping hook like “A Song Is Not the Song of the World,” and a horn ‘n reed meltdown like the last leg of “No Voice Was Raised,” as fragments of the “utopian and universal” whole that Tower Recordings guitarist Matt Valentine cited as the foundation of New Weird American aesthetics in an interview with Dusted. A figure like Chris Corsano, a drummer who splits his time between free-jazz and free-folk projects, is as prone as Schlarb feels Raposa is to “bust out a tune by either Dylan or Dolphy,” but he, like most of the American underground, remains tethered to his core aesthetic on a much shorter rope than Castanets gives itself. Castanets’ stylistic leaps are more radical and dramatized than the freak folkies’, and as a result, their music calls the legitimacy of its own assimilative project into question in a way that Sunburned Hand of the Man’s never does.

             Anticipating the counter-argument doesn’t always get a band off scot-free. If there is a beef to be had with First Light’s Freeze, it is that the album isn’t entirely devoid of the disjunctions that confronted show-goers after Cathedral came out. First Light’s Freeze does spread its wings further than any other Castanets recording, and it resolves its stylistic disparities quite beautifully. “No Voice Was Raised,” for example, begins in an almost uncomfortably polished mode, with a drum machine setting that would make Frank Lenz blush, reverb glossing over an autoharp until it sounds like something that wouldn’t be all that out of place in a Kelly Clarkson number; mid-song, a gigantic free-jazz ensemble enters the fray, introducing a new rhythmic vocabulary and initiating a more violent discourse with its strangled squeaks, but eventually the cacophony syncs up with the pop elements for a triumphant conclusion. It’s in consuming the album as a whole that we can begin to sense idiomatic disunity, at which point it’s easy to wonder if perhaps some methods of sonic storytelling aren’t quite the same.

             In his concert review, Adcock certainly senses this kind of rupture: “Listening to Castanets—watching them perform and thinking about all [our] descriptors—these words that supposedly mean something show how flailing we writers have been in attempting to contextualize Raposa.” If the group seems resistant to being written into any narrative other than its own incongruous corner, they’re at least embodying the petition in First Light’s Freeze’s liner notes that the world “take form in our belly as child / to be born in our wonderful wild.” This is very much music for a sticky, exhausting existence in which neither wholeness or fragmentation provides a satisfactory framework for experience. And if we ascribe to this notion of life as an elusive, frustrating formal arrangement, then First Light’s Freeze makes for some stunning Realism.