Cold Cave by Travis Shinn
The farther away we get from the ’80s, the bigger the era’s musical legacy becomes. It’s like we’re spinning a yarn describing a period a long time ago in a place far away filled with angular haircuts and bizarre sounds that shaped music for generations to come.
Cold Cave, a.k.a. Wesley Eisold, is the perfect example of this aesthetic’s long reach: Take a hardcore kid — a genre also defined in the ’80s — and prime him with gothic synth pop in the Joy Division mold; shake, light the fuse and step away. Cold Cave leans heavily on the sounds of a particular era, but consistently redefines what that means to the zeitgeist.
While the idea of a goth-hardcore hybrid entity might sound improbable or just weird, this sort of experimentation with genres and sounds is exactly what the ’80s were known along with the sonic vocabularies born then. In that way Cold Cave remains true to its roots. There’s only so much raging one punk can do before they need a different outlet for expression. In this case it’s darkwave and dance.
Joining Cold Cave on this tour are ADULT, a duo from Detroit who blend punk and danceable rhythms to make something that can appeal to anyone with ears. And then there’s VOWWS, from L.A. via Australia, who have had quite enough of your ’80s references, thank you very much. The duo is a pastiche of Nine Inch Nails industrial with anything else that tickles their fancy.
Yeah, got it, the ’80s are a huge influence, blah blah. But when utilizing very specific sounds, as all three of these outfits do, references are inevitable. Their soul resides not with any single genre — those are to be used and discarded as their music requires — but in their determined experimentation and ability to build off the past to make the future a little more fun, danceable and possibly dark. If that tendency gets consistently tagged as ’80s, so be it. Screw it man, everyone likes to get down to a good tune. Even the punks got to dance sometimes.
Cold Cave, ADULT and VOWWS play 8pm March 9 at Respectable Street in West Palm Beach. coldcave.net adultperiod.com vowwsband.com ~ Tim Moffatt
