07.15 CASTANETS, FREE ELECTRIC STATE @ NIGHTLIGHT
Portland-based songwriter Raymond Raposa seems to be a born
peripatetic: He left his California home at an early age and traveled
the country by bus. He's since recorded alone in a Nevada hotel room,
cut records in real studios with a litany of collaborators and wandered
into and out of the loosely termed New Weird America cartel.
Stylistically, the same holds for Raposa who carries an elemental,
often elliptical folk-song format into strange lands like a duffel bag
on his back—full-out drone trips, ham-fisted electronic jams, pure
pulse-of-the-road ditties. Raposa's songs, performances and ideas are
hit-and-miss, but he remains one of the most upredictable young minds
on the hirsute side of Amerindie. Tour mate M.A. Turner and R. Clint
Colburns' Cross aims for similarly spectral songcraft, psychedelic
elements eroding a bedrock of blues-and-western writing. Durham's Free
Electric State is the outlier here, in terms of both location and
sound: The quartet favors mid-length rock anthems rigorously structured
around charging rhythms and thick guitar tones, like a speaker cabinet
of shoegazer records rattling loose in some dark dancehall. $6/ 9:30
p.m.
—Grayson Currin