![]() ![]() Damned if that wasn’t an apt warning for the album altogether.Ĭave In significantly levels up in this period, ironically, by whittling down the line-up. “These are the crushes meant to crush you,” Brodsky bellows up front on “Moral Eclipse,” the compact but complex piece of thrashed-out barbarism Cave In barrels into for the opening moments of Until Your Heart Stops, their first formal full-length. We’d be remiss not to mention how Beyond Hypothermia also showcases the lighter side of Cave In, vis-à-vis its gloriously moronic, closing “Crambone,” a numbskull-simple, three-note mosh-metal goof full of feverish, mock-Hetfield ad-libs about “beef-filled bathtubs” and “seven-can six-packs.” In peak ’90s form, following a few minutes of silence, you’re treated to a pretty rippin’ secret Metallica medley. Piebald’s Travis Shettel also stood in briefly as Cave In’s touring bassist before Scofield joined in 1998. That makes sense from a foundational standpoint: Brodsky played bass on the former’s When Forever Comes Crashing in 1998, and rejoined Converge two decades later for the Bloodmoon project Converge members Ben Koller and Nate Newton have also played in Cave In at various points. “Chameleon” works the percussive, open chord chugging of mid-’90s hardcore with an almost “Arise”-like thrash mid-section on pieces like “Programmed Behind” or “Crossbearer,” Cave In feels like the nexus point between Converge-style guitar skittering and the earnest, awkward emo of fellow Mass locals Piebald. While embryonic, the collection is ambitious in scope. In the grand scheme of things, the difference in shrieks is negligible-both trade-off perfectly with Brodsky’s yearning yowl-but it was a weird move (the former vocalists acknowledged as much over Facebook a while back). Curiously, Cave In diverges from the source material by swapping most of the vocal performances from their first screamer, Jay Frechette, with then-current, but short-lived frontman Dave Scrod. This compilation CD brought together the band’s earliest vinyl singles, though the facelift motif throughout the artwork is key. Pre-order buy pre-order buy you own this wishlist in wishlist go to album go to track go to album go to track To celebrate the release of Heavy Pendulum-Cave In’s first to feature longtime friend, Converge member, and Scofield’s former Old Man Gloom bandmate Nate Newton on bass-below are just a few of the hardcore-adjacent highlights the group have soared through the stratosphere over the years. ![]() Outside of Antenna, Cave In’s full-lengths, EPs, and even a couple of live sets are all transmitted through Bandcamp via their current label, Relapse Records. Early on, a revolving-door line-up made the band’s identity a little unclear, especially when it came to who was behind the mic a bid for a mainstream breakthrough petered out following the release of their 2003 major label effort, Antenna most tragically, longtime bassist Caleb Scofield died in a traffic accident in 2018 when his truck collided with a concrete divider. The band have lovingly dubbed their eerie, octave-splitting sheen “The Cavinator pedal,” an inside joke furthered in the recent video for Heavy Pendulum’s “New Reality ” Brodsky asks producer Kurt Ballou if he’s got another PS3 inside the basement of his fabled GodCity Studios, which Brodsky plans on chaining-up to the three he’s already got in his hands.ĭespite that kind of light-hearted nature, Cave In’s sonic heft has been wrought with hurdles. Take the omnipresent, unnatural undulating of the Boss PS-3, a pitch-shifting guitar pedal that’s been bolted onto both Brodsky and McGrath’s pedalboards for a quarter century. That said, there are a few mainstays of the band’s sound. They perfected this up front on their 1998 debut album Until Your Heart Stops, yet went on to shake their sonic foundation with each subsequent release. The act’s earliest, parameter-expanding approach to hardcore didn’t exist in a vacuum-they were contemporaries, tourmates, and collaborators with the likes of Converge, Botch, and the Dillinger Escape Plan-but their unique twist co-mingled tech-heavy riffs with an unabashed look back at the then-recent past of grunge and dark alt-rock figures like Alice in Chains and Failure. Since forming in Methuen, Massachusetts in 1995, Cave In’s line-up has been anchored around guitarists Stephen Brodsky and Adam McGrath, and drummer John-Robert Connors. Named after a Codeine song, yet at various points pulling influence from the worlds of metallic hardcore, ’80s thrash, early ’90s alt gloom, the effects-soaked expanses of space rock, folk, scraping electronic noise, and more, it’s been a wild ride for Cave In and their listeners so far. That Cave In named their latest album Heavy Pendulum is quite fitting. ![]()
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