Shoot for the moon—even if you miss you’ll...probably end up making a total fucking faceplant. That’s a lesson many people in have learned the hard way in Hollywood, and to hear Wesley Eisold tell it, he's one of them. His last Cold Cave record, 2011’s Cherish the Light Years, was an explosive lunar launch that embraced every opportunity to tell you how awesome it was—nothing but souped-up goth-rock jock jams, bombastic lyrics and hyper-loud Brick Wall of China production. And yet, it failed to satisfy the one person most invested in its success: Wesley Eisold. Eisold told us that Cherish the Light Years is “the Cold Cave I can’t stand to hear,” and in the time since, he’s treated 2011 like a rejected transplant.
But in addition to separating himself from former collaborators, dealing with his internal demons and external demonization, Eisold got a prosthetic limb after spending his entire life hiding his missing left hand. The metaphor wasn’t lost on him—it’s a sign of being accountable, refusing to think of himself as a victim. These are themes that Eisold dealt with on the singles he intermittently released during 2013 as a free agent from Matador Records, and Full Cold Moon collects them to create an account of the imperfect progress of someone trying to take back control of his life.
So is Full Cold Moon the “new Cold Cave album”? Not really—though in a strange way, the familiarity of these songs make it far more “singles”-packed than the overtly commercial Cherish the Light Years. Eisold claims the new material is more “honest” as well, and that can be taken a number of ways, depending on whether you think the tag is a preemptive strike against the idea that he didn’t have much choice but to make more humble-sounding music. It’s clear that Eisold can’t stop writing anthems, as “Don’t Blow Up the Moon”, “God Made the World,” and “People Are Poison” are every bit as broad and striving as their titles indicate. But while the songs are fully formed, the production has a demo-like starkness and the underlying instrumentation is dank, rudimentary stuff that sounds like one man in his home studio, accountable to no one besides himself.
On opener “A Little Death to Laugh,” synths bleep like first-gen ringtones over unyielding, old-school machine beats and wormy bass while Eisold inverts his prior vocal performances, sounding like he’s being deflated rather than projecting outwards. “Oceans With No End” and “Black Boots,” two singles which immediately recall the rock dynamics of Eisold’s recent past than the New Romantic S&M of Loves Come Close, are among his strongest and most passionate work—but they’re also the songs on this release that could’ve used bolder presentation or a dynamic shift to turn their choruses into legitimate singalongs.
That said, even if Chris Coady’s hyper-compressed production on Cherish the Light Years is occasionally missed, over the span of an entire album, it was like a corset—meant to enhance and excite the onlooker, but it sure seemed painful for long periods of time. Eisold sounds freed on the first quarter of Full Cold Moon, which is almost an EP unto itself that reminds you Eisold is Cold Cave, and the project will sound however he chooses. After “A Little Death to Laugh,” “Young Prisoner Dreams of Romance” is a black-on-black leatherbound punk burner that’s over almost as soon as you read the title, immediately followed by the off-kilter, strangely beautiful coldwave instrumental “Tristan Corbière.”
But Full Cold Moon is more honest in the sense that Eisold is asking himself harder questions than he did on songs like “Underworld USA,” which were necessarily blank. It’s a shame that Eisold’s vocals are mixed curiously low; for one thing, they minimize the impact of his melodies, the immediate advantage he has over the hundreds of mid-fi coldwavers working in a similar range. Without the lyrics sheet, you can completely overlook his searching, often searing self-reckoning. During “A Little Death to Laugh,” Eisold mutters “I lost a limb on the left hand path/And I never ever got it back,” a double entendre with a hell of a lot of resonance considering Eisold’s life story as well as Cold Cave’s aesthetic. Meanwhile, “People Are Poison” sidesteps the potentially Reznor-esque notebook scrawling to flatly state, “You better die young or you will be me or something/And then they will say, ‘In your prime, you were nothing.’”
There’s a good chance your appreciation for Full Cold Moon will be inversely proportional to your appreciation of Cherish the Light Years’ flair for the dramatic, but remember that Cherish the Light Years is actually an outlier in Cold Cave’s discography—go back even further beyond the industrial New Order of Love Comes Close, to the days when Cold Cave was a noise project closer to former bandmate Dominick Fernow’s Prurient than Depeche Mode.
As to what Cold Cave is now, “Meaningful Life” is coincidentally stuck right in the middle of Full Cold Moon and is presented as a kind of spiritual crossroads for Eisold. It’s an eerie, free-floating meditation of organ and flutes reduced to 8-bit versions of themselves. As for Eisold: Some people live very meaningful lives, some don’t. Which one will he choose? And what does “meaningful” even mean? Eisold intimated that the next true Cold Cave album will be called Sunflower, so that probably gives an indication he’ll be choosing the right hand path out of the darkness.
