Acid-Folk Troubador Handles a Gorgeous Handful of Psych
Brandon Stosuy
Tuesday, October 25th 2005
Most Popular
-
Scientology's Crushing Defeat A previously unpublished saga of an $8 million check
-
Heath Ledger Peers Into The Abyss in The Dark Knight Christopher Nolan's Batman returns, delivers the kick-ass goods
-
The Houses That Ruthlessness Built Welcome to middling baseball in sleek new cathedrals
-
The NYPD Rips Up Rappers Rebel Diaz and their hip-hop politics run afoul of the cops
-
The Trials of Jean Grae Why an NYC rap star threatened retirement, and why she hasn't stopped threatening yet
Paisley headbands have supplanted trucker caps as hipster headgear, but it's tough believing all these new folkies hit puberty digging ISB, Jansch, and Vashti Bunyan. (If Harry Smith were alive, I'd pay him to do alchemical background checks.) At least judging from a quick Google search, one of the more legit sounding players, Nick Castro, has nothing to hide. L.A.'s acid troubadour played in improvisational Children of Gauhd, and he runs the imprint/distribution service Records of Gauhd. Before that he rocked to Arthur Lee and the Kinks. Nowadays, his mournful psych structures are less peculiar than Newsom and occasionally include a stilted mannerism absent from the hairy-fairy Manson/Donovan posse. Still, the stuff's gorgeous, and he allows freewheeling variations to leak into moon-altar paeans via a flügelhorn-toting backup crew, the Poison Tree: Josephine Foster's a flanged banshee; Espers jam cello and dulcimer into multiple crannies. Actually, Castro himself handles an armload, and his "Music For Mijwiz," a raging Middle Eastern street jamboree, suggests a corner of the enchanted glen where dude should set up camp more regularly.
Recent Articles
More by Brandon Stosuy
Sweet Nothing
A new bio and a Dumb and Dumber avant la lettre
TV Eyes
Shy, surrealist pop pours forth from the Human TV
Receivers
Baroque Brooklynites Telepathe try to read your mind
Pitted Out
Painting the Whitehouse blank amid the grind and noise
Second Hand Dose
Hand-me-down rock-qua-rock bands flatter via imitation
Village Voice Insiders
- Weekly villagevoice.com
- Weekly freebies and Special Offers
- Daily "What To Do in NYC" E-mail
- Information on the Performing Arts
| buy, sell, trade 3,672 | musician 2,675 |
| rentals 18,419 | jobs 5,263 |
| adult entertainment 9,497 | |
| classifieds | backpage.com | Post ads for free! | |
|---|---|
