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

Cave Singers

Not sure you remember my hissy fit about the Cave Singers…(the “I’m Fucked” post from January 24, which seems to have been read mostly by Secretly Canadian publicists)…The article came out okay, nothing special. A very short version ran in the Spring print issue of Blurt, and the online version (slightly longer) is here.

Here’s “Swim Club”

So all’s well that ends well.

Shelley Short again

I’ve been away all day, down in Northampton, nice day, nothing very reportable about it. Meanwhile, Blurt’s run my review of Shelley Short’s A Cave, a Canoo, which I enjoyed very much, albeit in a low-key way. I said:

Shelley Short makes simplicity look easy. Her gentle, minimally accompanied songs sound like they might have been composed on the spot, sung in a near-whisper so as not to wake the young ones up and recorded directly on the collective memory. Her soft voice flutters effortlessly over quick flights of melody and slides languorously into sustained notes, not a hint of artifice glinting through. Her guitar playing is soft and unassuming, a string of lovely notes left to hang in the air. Her lyrics touch obliquely on everyday natural images, often drawing the connections to love, life, death and memory through ellipsis and understatement.

The rest

“Time Machine/Submarine”

I’ve put this mp3 up before, but if you didn’t catch it, here it is again.

Blurt has also got another live review of the Lightning Dust/Cave Singers tour up today. Whose do you think it better, eh? (Don’t answer that, I don’t really want to know.)

Jud Cost’s


Mine

Lightning Dust and Cave Singers live

I went to see Lightning Dust, part of the extended Black Mountain family, and Cave Singers a couple of weeks ago and wrote this for Blurt.

Cave Singers and Lightning Dust have a fair amount in common. Both are from the Northwest - Cave Singers from Seattle, Lightning Dust from Vancouver - and seldom play the smaller towns on the east coast. (Lightning Dust has been to Northampton once, Cave Singers never.) Both are offshoots of louder bands in aggressive punk and rock traditions. Derek Fudesco was in Murder City Devils and Pretty Girls Make Graves before Cave Singers, and Amber Webber and Joshua Wells both hail from the Black Mountain family. And both are now exploring gentler, more traditional Americana sounds - though with an edge and intensity that comes from rock.

The rest of the review


Lightning Dust’s “I Knew”


Cave Singers’ “At the Cut”