Nick Castro & The Young Elders - Come Into Our House
Tracklist:
- Winding Tree
- Sleeping in a Dream
- Picolina
- One I Love
- Altar
- Voices from the Mountains
- Standing on the Standing Stone
- Lay Down Your Arms
- Promises Unbroken
Don’t listen to this album while driving. It doesn’t matter where you’re driving, either. You might be driving home from work through a national forest; you might be driving to a party in a nearby city neighborhood; you might be driving to the gas station to get some smokes. But if you listen to Nick Castro & The Young Elders’ Come Into Our House in the car, you’re destined to find yourself driving in a dark and mysterious desert as the moon projects ominous shadows of mountain ranges over your path.
Safe between the headphones in your living room, however, might be safe enough to enjoy the sweeping majesty of Castro’s new album.
Having left behind his previous backing band, The Poison Tree, Castro gathered Wendy Watson and the newly assembled Young Elders to collect an amazing plethora of sounds and arrange them into haunting melodies and droning, meditative musical excursions.
The songs and tunes run the gamut of Renaissance-inspired folk to Eastern conversational jams (think Nick Drake taking acid, Syd Barrett if he lived in Nepal, Grateful Dead if “Blues for Allah” was representative of their entire catalogue).
And what shows the true genius of the composition and arrangement is how the myriad instruments blend with each other and seem both natural and fated. Modal melodies are accented by galloping percussion; gentle guitars are doubled with swelling drones. The music has a pulse and breath of its own, and that is what helps make nine- and 13-minute excursions such as “Voices From the Mountains” and “Lay Down Your Arms” pass as if they were two-minute pop songs. What else helps is the sequencing: Long, instrumental tunes are not bunched together. Rather, they are subtly interspersed with shorter songs, allowing the album to maintain the listener’s attention.
The shorter songs, such as “One I Love,” are grand tales with vocal harmonies. “One I Love” has an exciting electric bass and electric guitars that blend in nicely with organ and percussion. This song is a great example of how full a song can sound without a “traditional” band setup and features Watson’s gorgeous voice, which heretofore had only harmonized with Castro’s.
For a fine, bite-sized example of both the folk and experimental sides of the album, check out “Sleeping in a Dream.” In less than five minutes, Castro and company lead us through a gorgeous minor melody, walking “a thousand days” before revealing that it’s “all a dream” filled with backwards sounds and primal drumming that give themselves to a sound like a decaying music box, sad and sweet, slowing to silence.
MP3 Samples:
One I Love
Sleeping in a Dream