My love affair with Caverns began a few years ago when my Dale took me to see them play at some nondescript meat-head bar in DC. I feel bad saying it but i had pretty low expectations for the show. I mean, Dale was pretty stingy with the praises and the clientele at the bar were certainly not my crowd. I just remember hearing all kinds of conservative rhetoric bandied about while Dale was reiterating that they had just started playing and were getting better.
But goddamn did these dudes rock! When the lights went down, you forgot about the douchey DC guys all over the place and just heard well-trained musicians going off uncontrollably. To this day, I've never heard a band play with this instrumentation: solid rhythm section coupled with heavy metal guitar and of all things, a super clean jazz piano. Simply put: the guitar riffs and the piano meanders, occupying huge swaths of the track at hand. They take turns blasting the melody around and converge at just the right time. Build ups for short attention spans and monumental hooks that aren't over the top or annoyingly dramatic.
They just dropped a sick ep on FARC records that you should pick up ASAP. They're amazing live and the record definitely does a better job than most of capturing this energy on tape. It boils down the aforementioned formula into a perfectly distilled handful of tracks that manage to be approachable and intellectual. Hopefully, I'll be able to convince them to enter the Rape Valley fold and we'll get to hear more from them soon enough.
Since I don't wanna step on any one's toes, I'm only leaking tacks I've seen on other blogs. But don't get me wrong: "This Are Syntax" is one of my favorite Caverns tracks. So buy their records and holla holla at them when they're within a few hundred miles.
Caverns "This Are Syntax" mediafire
Nana Grizol
Titus Andronicus