"Castanets have been lumped in with these freak folks for good reason. Namely, the lead singer has a long beard and sounds like a freak. What more do you need? Actually the instrumentation and mood created by their album are much freakier than any song about birds, trees, and precipitation. Many of the songs on First Light's Freeze are creepy. This isn't the lost soundtrack to the '60s; this is the lost soundtrack to a zombie love movie. Even though Castanets create folk music with tinges of country, this is not the same old crap. But saying whether it's pleasant or unpleasant, uplifting or depressing, that's the tricky part. The mood... show more
"Castanets have been lumped in with these freak folks for good reason. Namely, the lead singer has a long beard and sounds like a freak. What more do you need? Actually the instrumentation and mood created by their album are much freakier than any song about birds, trees, and precipitation. Many of the songs on First Light's Freeze are creepy. This isn't the lost soundtrack to the '60s; this is the lost soundtrack to a zombie love movie. Even though Castanets create folk music with tinges of country, this is not the same old crap. But saying whether it's pleasant or unpleasant, uplifting or depressing, that's the tricky part. The mood is ambiguous. The one absolute is that the album is consistently captivating." - Pop Matters show less