Cave – Threace LP Drag City Records

The third in a string of awesome full-length adventures from Chicago’s CAVE is Threace—an album that appeals on all levels: animal, abstract and alien, and all at once; one multi-colored-circa-2013 grab-bang. Threace is a real “back to the lab” kind of album for CAVE —with a few more guitars and a few less keyboards on board, the band is energized and ready to try things in a new way. All CAVE music grabs at your ears and the soft tissue within, and yet this time, it’s just so much more super-crystalline, bottom-booting and all-spacious than ever before. Recorded on a 1″ 8-track Scully machine that may or may not have spent some quality burnin’ time at Muscle Shoals, Threace was half-planned and half-jammed using different mic placements, building up from a basic set of as few mics as possible. Then, they got out the razor blade and used it to cut tape (and realities) together into a metro-musical albumen that’s only started to flower in this world. Known for playing with rolling funk minimalism; Threace finds the band inhabiting their cut-up aesthetic with tremendous ease and fewer reference points than before. They access new depths of meditative stasis, and then torpedo the dream and turn on a dime to ride the riffs again. It’s no wonder that they spent such quality time on the sounds, because the writing now has the close fit of a second skin. From exotica to erotica to rock ‘n yuh, the songs are lived in, with their own running logic and muscle memory. Now the music plays the band. On Threace, CAVE have gained access to their unconscious mind, and we hope they never find their way out again.