Initial listens to Chicago cosmic rockers Cave are nothing short of confounding. Initially it’s rock music as a science experiment, clean carefully controlled, playing music without haze, eschewing reverb and effects for a taut clean sound that pummels you with its repetition. With long songs, they’re willing to sit on a groove endlessly, like they’re hammering into concrete, creating instrumental music that has the precision of maths rock. For the many people who approach guitar music looking for heroes, looking for mind blowing fist pumping feats of musicianship, for unrestrained adrenalin, or palpable pathos, they’ll be sorely disappointed in Cave. Yet that’s actually their strength. Instead Cave are very much the definition of a band, leaving the flourishes for their contemporaries and focussing on the bigger picture. This picture is very difficult to explain, as they craft these highly repetitive komische tunes that seem to reference everyone from Neu to Battles in a totally distinctive and uncompromising way. This isn’ music you listen to so much as let it happen to you. Your subconscious will do the rest.
But after setting up the listener with the first two tracks, Sweaty Fingers which offers numbing straitjacket repetition and Silver Headband which unleashes some strutting lead guitar over a similarly restrictive rhythm section, something very strange happens.
They shift gear entirely, suddenly we’re all loose, semi prog with trippy wah wah peddles and congas that seem to think they’re in Santana. There are spacey quasi-jazz breakdowns, dynamic shifts and the music just flows on all psychedelic hazy searching for, and ultimately finding a groove. This track in particular Arrow’ Myth, at over eight and a half minutes is more consistent structurally than it initially appears, and probably one of the best piece on the album. This is Cave taking their time and stretching out.
As the album progresses the three piece periodically throw more and more ingredients into the mix, almost like they’re trying to sabotage their own recipe, yet their tunes really benefit from the occasional diversion, whether it’s a drifting jazzy guitar riff, flute or tenor sax.
Threace is their third album, and it’s a stunning experiment in pounding angular stasis, in minimal 70′ fusion rock outs, in restrained motorik percussion and new age jazzy noodling. Strangely enough it not only fits, but actually feels really unique and new.
