Cave In - Perfect Pitch Black

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When I did the interview with Stephen Brodsky (lead singer/guitarist of Cave In), which was conducted on a curb by the side of a road in London, a few months before 'Perfect Pitch Black' was released, I had already heard most of it as demos. Infact, quite a lot of people had. The demos had leaked onto the internet and the band didn't even mind - they even gave a list of the songs they had recorded to help people with their searches to find them. My thoughts back then were that this was a mediocre collection of songs, they were good but by no means can it rival their epic sonic space-rock (etc) album, 'Jupiter'. I knew they were capable of better things, yet they had underacheived. To be honest, I was pretty disappointed. When I asked Stephen if he was happy with them, it really didn't hide the fact that I wasn't.

Make no bones about it; 'Perfect Pitch Black' is a collection of demos from 2004 and a few off of their Lollapolooza bootleg CD. They've added some vocal harmonies and another guitar line here and there to some tracks but nothing hugely different. There are moments of greatness, 'The World Is In Your Way' and 'Paranormal' probably come the closest, yet they get hampered with boring, un-complex, riffs that get repeated again and again until the song becomes totally numb.

It's just not as fruitful as some of their previous offerings. This is a CD of a band clutching at straws, not a band that opened its arms out and exploded mind-melting, melodic, yet powerful, songs into your face. Which is the worst thing about this album - you just know they're capable of so much more.

Maybe it's to do with the way the CD is presented: as an album. If this was a more subtle release, if maybe they just took a few of the better songs off the album and released it as an EP then I would probably be more accepting to it and not feel this huge disappointment that I do when I play the album now.

The band know they've underacheived. Stephen recently said in an interview that he didn't really spend too much time working on the lyrics (listen to the embarrassing last line where he manages to rhyme 'The World Is In Your Way' with 'There's hell to pay!' - not one of the better Brodsky moments) and bassist Caleb summed it up perfectly when he said, "...It's not quite the sound of a new chapter and not quite the sound of an old one, but maybe the sound a page would make when you flipped it over". But this doesn't justify its release. Why didn't they just wait until they had written a new masterpiece, something to rival 'Jupiter' and then release it? Something they weren't just happy with but they were ecstatic with?

Craig Sharp