Cave System - Show 3/12 Belmont (debut album: Thunderground Railroad - review)

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Cave System – Thunderground Railroad (self)

Cave System brings a bit o' wiry roughness (and spacey synths) to the soft-swooned post-rock of that northwestern tasting heart-on-the-sleeve sort of "indie." Spastic drums spill down all tightly locked and ricocheting into that math-rocky polyrhythm shit, while still being able to pummel like a ton o’ bricks. Mystic bending tones from intertwining guitars, taut and swirled like mobius strips ring in sonorous spaced out echoes over a steady burning reverb-soaked rhythm guitar – while the bass bleats, boogies and sidewinds along, bouncing as intricately as the percussion with which it aligns. The vocals, inescapably, can feel Gibbard-ish, in tone and poetic formation – but the words and ways definitely have their own charm and their own world in which to expound some of the chilliest love-spurned screeds I’ve ever heard while shifting to rousing spring time spurs or, yet, melodically musing on space travel, and cosmonaut simians.

Their debut reveals an already striking synchronicity (as these young chaps have been playing together since (or before) they got their driver’s licenses) and however modestly they shuffle into the Detroit scene they’re already catching up to their big brother types at Sub Sprawl in doling out the new millennial take on post-punk, jazzy-spazzy experimental rock, layered tones, intense rhythms and a smorgasbord of philosophic-indie type lyrics spanning early 90’s slacker-rock through early 00’s neo-college rock.

They play the Belmont 3/12