Artist: Raymond Byron and the White Freighter
Release: Little Death Shaker
Released: 2012
Label: Asthmatic Kitty
Catalog#: AKR 087CD
Format: FLAC / Lossless / WEB
[color=blue]Country: USA
Style: ROCK

1. Allegiance (3:18)
2. Little Death Shaker (2:15)
3. Some of My Friends (2:07)
4. Turnpike/Bedsheet (3:21)
5. You'll Never Surf Again
6. Don't That Lake Just Shine (5:11)
7. Whippoorwill (3:11)
8. A Little More Credit (1:08)
9. Some Kind of Fool (3:41)
10. You're Not Standing Like You Used To (2:43)
11. Stateline (9:46)
12. Meridian, MS (3:26)
13. Allegiance 2 (3:37)

2012, the end of the world or the beginning of new things? Let's bet on the latter. Going on five full-length records since 2004, Asthmatic Kitty's Castanets has given us a wide-lens look at deconstructed Americana. Come September 4th, Castanets' Ray Raposa will debut a new band, Raymond Byron and the White Freighter, and a brand-new full-length, Little Death Shaker.

Where the 'Nets trafficked in swampy, ambient improv and avant-country gone coal black, Raposa's new stuff is pure roadhouse blues, buggy neons buzzing and spilled beer, big drums and the type of loud, up-in-the-red guitars that'd make Patrick Swayze bust some dude's grill.

Stripped of all noise influences and focusing on straight-up songs, Little Death Shaker is a record evocative of late nights and dusty parking lots, long drives and boozy hookups. This is the work of a dude who's spent his youth and young manhood on tour and it comes through in both the music and the lyrics. Where Castanets’ lyrics gave us Ray Carver-ian fragments and it's-what-you-leave-out-that-counts minimalism, here we see Raposa back from the battleground with stories to tell. This is the most lyric-heavy Raposa's been and it's also the most playful and humorous, and you get the feeling some of these songs would be the ones that would go down best near 2am at some weird sports bar dive in southeast Alabama/Iowa/Mississippi. (We can just see some big biker dude/fallen NASCAR star/Gary Busey lookalike sitting back-to-bar, Bud in hand, having a good-natured laugh over the punchline from "Some of My Friends" or the WTF premise of the Dan Reeder penned "You'll Never Surf Again.")