Cave

You all know I like those droning, thumping, working-one-chord-for-20-minutes instrumental bands, right? So, I like Cave, but...decided that they're not Neu! by a good stretch.

Here's the best paragraph from my review of Neverendless, out now on Drag City.

There’s more than a shadow of Neu! hanging over opening salvo “WUJ” in the steady percolation of rhythm, the clipped, diffident lyricism of guitars, the abstract way that melody is subsumed by machine-like forward motion. Drummer Rex McMurry’s cadence has the same dry, snare-accented intensity that Dinger enforced on “Fur Immer,” though guitarist Cooper Crain is less a melodic counterpoint, more a source of additional rhythmic tension, than Rother was. Additional instruments, a pulsing organ motif (keyboardist Rotten Milk), a bumping undertone of bass (Dan Browning), accentuate the track’s restlessness. A blare of guitar sound breaks the tension, briefly, but there is no real space for rest or contemplation. Neu! was able, sometimes, to implant a stillness into the center of its most frantic rants. Cave is either in motion or at rest, but never both at once.


The rest of the review


Adam Roberts