Castevet – Summer Fences – Album Review

By this point, you know that there are times when I listen to Jay-Z and/or Fugazi to get myself into an appropriate frame of mind for any number of activities.  There’s nothing as good for walking into a hostile meeting than a killer Jay-Z lyric; there are almost too  many to list: “Things just ain’t the same for gangsters, but I’m a little to famous to shoot these pranksters;” “My raps don’t have melodies, this shit make [African American persons] wanna go and commit felonies;” and (probably my most favorite) “[Citizen Dick] is the army, better yet the navy, we will kidnap your babies, spit at your ladies.”  If you don’t want to slap somebody in the mouth after listening to vintage Hova, you don’t have a pulse.  (Obviously this isn’t always a good thing, but there are contexts when you want the old dander up.  Just saying.)  In much the same sense, there aren’t many songs that I’d rather listen to before a hockey game (I’ve played since I was five) than Fugazi’s “Turnover.”  Turn that thing up, remember that everyone else  in the world is an asshole and go to town.  True story.  All this to say that there are times when I like shit that is loud and aggressive.  I like music that wears its heart on its sleeve, sneers at the world, signals that there are things that we should simultaneously be angry because of and not give a fuck about.  I like music that reminds me that it’s okay to ditch my hipster veneer and feel. Castevet, while not wholly loud or aggressive, offer such music.  They hit me in the gut or, maybe more critically, in the primordial part of my brain that recognizes action and violence and fear and ennui.  Their recently released record, Summer Fences, is laced with subtlety, but with a clearly aggressive streak.  It’s loud, but thoughtful, music.  It taps into the primal scream hovering just beneath all of our surfaces, but does so with care and consideration.  It’s music for the thoughtful anarchist.  In short, I’m not quite ready to swap out Repeater in my pre-game mix, but Castevet is making a charge.

If you want to be reductive, Castevet sound like Explosions in the Sky with the addition of a way more pissed off Dicky Barrett on vocals.  (That sells Castevet way short, but it is an effective short-hand for wrapping your brain around the concept.)  The eight songs on Summer Fences feature noodly, interlacingly intricate  (but still heavy) guitar pieces that speak to a definite math influence.  These lofty guitar setpieces are offset by the startlingly grizzly vocals of Nick Wakim and Ron Petzke.  All you want to do after listening to the record is offer these cats a cup of warm tea; they sound like they’ve been gargling with shards of glass soaked in acid.  If the argument against math rock is that it’s impersonal (In the same sense that all genres that emphasize skill and craft over emotion and elan aren’t; think of The Ramones at the same time you’re thinking of  Yes for the classical example), Castevet subvert and distort the argument by absolutely wailing through the vocals.  Dudes absolutely mean it.  You can’t argue that this record is about precision (although,in part, it is) beacause, at its core, the record is about emotion.  I’d be hard pressed to quote one distinct lyric from the whole record, but (in this one instance), that makes absolutely no difference.  Castevet could be reading the phonebook and I would care.

There are a lot of things to like about Summer Fences. (I’ve written this joke before, in reference to Summer Cats, but I’m going to do it again.  I hope that Summer Fences is the Summer Teeth thing, as in summer fences, some are not.)  One of the things that made me smile is that Castevet appears to subscribe to the Billy Corgan school of song naming.  (I heard an interview with the Smashing Pumpkins auteur way back in the day where he said something like this (time and circumstance mean that I am paraphrasing heavily): “You write a song about your family, but you can’t name it “My Family,” so you think to yourself that you’ve got dinner with your family and you eat at a table and the table has napkins and the napkins are made out of cloth, so you call the song “Reams of Cotton” or some shit.”  All this to say that Billy Corgan staunchly endorsed the non sequitur as song title.)  The names for the songs are almost universally non-nonsensical and hilarious, as in: “Beating High Schoolers at Arcade Games,” and “When a Movie is Made in France, It’s Called Cinemas.”  This kind of non-nonchalance belies the fact that the songs themselves are dead serious; this is the kind of dichotomy that I like.  Past their titles, the songs are good.  It’s another one of those records that you can throw on and play straight through, which is a decidedly good thing.

“Space Jam (The Return)” offers a lot of what Castevet do well.  It’s five minutes of slowly building instrumental mathiness, capped by a propulsive vocal explosion.  The vocals to instrumental ratio is tilted a little bit more towards vocals on much of the rest of the record, but the emotive firepower of the payoff is as good as it gets on the record.  If you dig this, you will dig the rest.

Castevet – Space Jam (The Return)