Castevet
Summer Fences
Count Your Lucky Stars; 2009
As long-term readers of this site will note, I wholeheartedly approve of any and all bands that have both the desire and ability to blur the often-staid lines between genres. Furthermore, I am on record as being quite the conflicted consumer of post-rock, a style of music whose purveyors seem to find their way into my e-mail inbox with a high degree of regularity. These two trends have finally come together in the guise of Summer Fences by Castevet, a record that has a dense post-rock foundation, but does its damnedest to weave in highly concentrated dosages of math-flavored indie rock and post-hardcore vocals. The result just might make me wave a white flag in defeat.
Now, when I use the word “defeat,” I’m not declaring that this Midwestern rock outfit has failed in its mission per se, but more that I can’t quite put my finger on what I actually like and don’t like about this album. As musicians, the band has a capable grasp on the defining elements of the styles it’s chosen to combine together: the guitars alternately ring out with deft finger-picking or build with the appropriate crescendo, while the tempos and pacing achieve the necessary state of syncopated flux. Yet, as musical alchemists, the mixture that Castevet is attempting to create is more akin to a colloid, in that the record is separated into distinct sonic halves and the passionate roar of the post-hardcore vocals has proven unable to bring the two sides together.
Summer Fences is a perplexing herky-jerky record, slipping back and forth between the aforementioned post-rock and mathy indie textures with every song, and not within each song (as was surely intended). There is little to no meshing of styles and genres actually occurring, at least not to my ears. Hearty anthems like the angular indie rock or the “Plays One On TV” and the soaring sounds of “Space Jam (The Return)” are placed alongside average mid-tempo tracks like “Beating High Schoolers At Arcade Games” and “Stranger You Know” to ill effect. It creates this weird, uncomfortable tension across the entirety of the record, and I find it more than off-putting and unappealing.
My first inclination is to examine the need to place a gruff voice over such pretty and technically precise melodies. More often than not, such utterances lend a somewhat misleading energy and intensity to some of the songs, creating a sharp dichotomy between the haves and have-nots, when instead, Castevet should be seeking to create a more unified whole. Thus, when Summer Fences concludes and I’m left examining the stylistic gaps between the songs as opposed to the actual music itself, I must cop to being more than slightly confused. Despite the overt quality of the assembled parts, something feels a bit lacking in terms of the final construction.