Send "Cold Cave " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Guardian |
 "Take me to the future. I'm ready," sings Wesley Eisold. That may be true, but someone appears to have stuck a spanner in his time machine – he's definitely heading backwards. The destination is 1982 or thereabouts, given the Human League and the Cure appear to be the main influences on Cherish the Light Years, though the horns of Dexys and Peter Hook's bass tone are discernible, too. Chris Coady's production makes the whole thing sound rich, but quite why Eisold, a Bostonian, is so fixated on the UK of 30 years ago is unclear, especially as Cherish the Light Years is apparently a tribute to his new home of New York. Whatever the reason, this collection seems retrograde and oddly neutered, the chilly vulnerability of its inspirations recoded as muscular bombast....full text |
| Popmatters |
| Don’t be surprised if you can’t recognize Cold Cave when the group’s new album Cherish the Light Years starts in media res, pounding you over the head from the get-go with a startling blast of churning riffs and heavy, relentless rhythms on “The Great Pan Is Dead”. While frontman Wesley Eisold made a name for his band a few years ago on a handful of bounding, almost giddy synth-pop singles, he’s put quite a bit more muscle on Cold Cave’s techno formula this time around. If you’re looking for the new New Order keyboards that got Cold Cave noticed to begin with, you’ll find them as background music for the opener’s mix of Ministry-like industrial noise and bruising hardcore punk. Maybe it’s nothing you would expect from Cold Cave, but getting reacquainted this way is almost as good as the first impression the band made. There may be nothing else as intense and exhilarating on Cherish the Light Years as “The Great Pan Is Dead”, but the leadoff number represents how almost every track on the new album is carefully composed and well-conceived, proving how much Eisold has grown as a songwriter. Whereas the band’s debut Love Comes Close was an engrossing but scattered effort built around a few brilliant singles—particularly, the title track and “Life Magazine”—pretty much any of the songs on the latest outing has a sense of coherence and structure to stand strong on its own. So the resonant synth refrains and drum machine beats of “Confetti” might recall “Love Comes Close”, but the new number feels like it has more substance to it, with Eisold’s lyrics coming through cleaner and the instrumental parts sharper and bulked up. Better yet is “Icons of Summer”, which bolts out of the gate with twitchy keyboard lines like another New Order remake before it gets dancepunky à la LCD Soundsystem, which is most pronounced as Eisold does his best James Murphy rave-up with his deep-throated voice. And when you hear the electro-rock breakdowns on “Icons of Summer”, you realize you might not miss LCD so much with Cold Cave around....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| To be an American fan of UK new wave in the 1980s was to acknowledge that your homegrown culture wasn't giving you what you needed. New Order, the Cure, Depeche Mode, and Siouxsie and the Banshees made broadly appealing pop music but also appealed to outcast kids in the U.S. because they clearly came from somewhere else. Drop any of them into your average American town and they would be mocked; the straight world would make fun of their haircuts and clothing and make-up. That was part of the appeal. They were theatrical and sensitive. They were singing about feelings. They were androgynous. Those drawn to this music at the time articulated a cluster of associations and feelings around these qualities that endures two decades later. Cold Cave's 2009 full-length debut, Love Comes Close, tapped into the emotional space of 80s new wave. It wasn't just that the group sounded like bands from that decade, though that was certainly part of it. But like Peter Murphy, Ian Curtis, or Robert Smith, Cold Cave leader Wesley Eisold has a voice that's both strong and vulnerable, a low croon with a deeply embedded ache. And when used with basslines and spiky guitars that sound lifted from some lost band on Factory, his voice perfectly conveyed the drama of being a teenage outsider. That feeling continues on Cherish the Light Years, but here everything has been blown up to a degree that borders on absurdity. From opening cut "The Great Pan Is Dead", Cherish feels like a John Hughes film projected in an IMAX theater-- guitars wail, synths scream, and the whole thing is loud, loud, loud. And Eisold responds in kind, his voice rippling with a new desperation-- he'll come running as stars explode, hearts break, and we all yearn for salvation. It's a bracing and brilliant album opener, stating in no uncertain terms, "This is now a different band." Just a few short years ago, Cold Cave were a home-recording project beholden to the sound of early industrial and minimal synth. The throbbing murk in that music made you think something was wrong with your stereo-- many tracks barely qualified as noise, forget about songs. But on Cherish, Cold Cave sound like they're storming the gates of the mainstream, ready to appeal to anyone with an ear for big, bold, goth-pop....full text |
Cold Cave lyrics
|
| ||||||||||
