If Liz Phair woke up one morning, stretched, and pulled a little brother from her third rib, this would be him. And that is high high praise from me, do not be misled. 
Like Liz, the rhythms and melodies are full of surprises but completely sneak in your head and stick there. The lyrics can knock you flat without your ever seeing the windup. Lastly like Liz, his singing is not decorated or prettied up in any way. What he sings is what you get. And what you get I really liked. 
This CD has a pleasing low-fi attitude and many playful touches. There’s an intelligence and enthusiasm here that I found impossible to resist. Casey is clever without being obnoxious, intriguing without being impossibly cute, complex and completely inviting at the same time. 
What I find as his greatest strength is his surprising and unpredictable lyric imagery. He did not rhyme “light” with “night” or “tight” even once. Anywhere. One of my favorite lines is on “tickets to the show” where he sings “Cause I figure I could work out as a clown/Wear the red nose around town and breathe some funnier air”. 
The whole CD is sweet, jangly, intelligent and playful. I highly recommend all pop lovers give this a listen. 
-Stacey Board for The Muse's Muse, January 2003
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This CD is excellent I would recommend it to anyone. It has a great beat and the line up of songs is good too.
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For those who have tired of the mainstream folk stuff, of the coffeehouse players, of big-time acoustic players such as Dave Matthews, you might want to give this disc a listen. Holford is energetic to say the least; his fretboard work is busy and intricate, yet doesn't create aural slush. His vocals range from pleasant to edgy to the infrequent falsetto, and never sound pretentious. Yet, there's also something larger at work here, a feeling, in the ears of this listener, that makes me think his sound is not unlike that of a recently released inmate of a mental institution. And I mean that in a good way. There's an edgy instability here, an unpredictable sensation that at any minute, Holford might just step out of the speakers and bash you roundly about the head with his guitar. And that, I really like. I should have been tipped off by the disc title (I'm a bit slow today), but in the end, this disc comes across as a fresh offering showing a good amount of promise. 

- from NY Rock, March 2003
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I was just listening to this CD and was struck by how beautifully produced, arranged, and performed it is. Casey is on his way to being one of the most important songwriters to come out of his NYC folk music community. His tunes are very inventive and refreshing to the ear, as his particular brand of Casey-think is unlike even his proclaimed influences. "Bad Spell, Good Spell" presents a simplistic collage of sounds, with not much more than guitar and voice and another punctuating sound on each track, but the songwriting is duly complex and played very, very well. For songwriting that surprises and soothes, this is such a great investment. Highly recommended.
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