Since forming in 2010, the New York five-piece Caveman have been slowly garnering attention for their loose, deceptively expansive indie-folk rock. Their music carries both a professional air and world-weary rasp, an impression that’s borne out of the group’s credentials, and overlapping lives, as journeyman veterans of NYC’s massive music scene for the better part a decade. The genesis for Caveman was catalyzed by the almost synchronized dissolutions of its member’s former bands, remembered now only with ghostly MySpace portals: The Subjects (lead singer/multi-instrumentalist Matthew Iwanusa and guitarist Jimmy “Cobra” Carbonetti), White Clam (keyboardist Sam Hopkins), The End of the World (drummer Stefan Marolachakis), and Elefant (bassist Jeff Berrall).
They watched their former musical projects run their course and run out of steam, and slowly drifted toward each other as friends hanging out in Carbonetti’s custom guitar shop in the East Village, eventually realizing they wanted to get on with it as a band. They self-released their debut CoCo Beware in 2011 and toured behind an album of competent indie folk with weird proggy flourishes and surprisingly tight four-part harmonies. It was tentative in some instances and looser in others; more of an early blueprint than anything else. CoCo was then snatched up by Fat Possum, and when the band found themselves ready to put together their self-titled sophomore release, they were armed with the chemistry built from sharing a stage for two straight years.
Holed up in Iwanusa’s grandmother’s New Hampshire barnhouse, they began to work through ideas in long jam sessions, cultivating and tweaking a folksy post-rock template that’s reliant on nuanced interplay between the band members. The result is Caveman, a sophomore album that embraces the spacey expanses and mournful, low-key melodies only hinted at on their debut. Gone is the straightforward thump of songs like “My Time” or the placid alt-country of “Old Friend”, replaced by stranger, more confident experiments like the lurching, ethereal “Over My Head” or the Nebraska-echoing “I See You”.
The group hasn’t rebuilt their aesthetic completely, but they are changing the way they communicate it, and the way they communicate with each other from song to song. Their rich, Brian Wilson harmonies are deployed in unexpected places, and are more haunting and reserved than uplifting. “Where’s the Time”, a bass line gurgling, syncopated slow burn that eventually blossoms into a cacophony of ambient textures and a psyched-up guitar solo, uses those harmonies to underline a chorus that’s oddly selfish and detached: “Where’s the time to waste on someone else’s life.” The fragile, atmospheric folk of opener “Strange to Suffer”, and it’s album closing counterpart “Strange”, has the group harmonizing with almost-falsettos in a way that resembles chanting monks attempting a seance, repeating the song’s only line just twice: “Strange to suffer, why do these people turn away.”
But for all those instances of heady explorations, there’s a lingering feeling that they are still hesitant to really kick down the doors of their songwriting confinements. A track like “Pricey", with that incredible, stalking guitar riff that could have been teleported here from Pink Floyd’s Meddle, tries to be a dark, prog-inflected opus, but lurches around listlessly with pedestrian vocal parts from the usually stellar Iwanusa. Likewise, the brightly colored neon of more widely used synthesizers doesn’t always gel effectively with band’s usually sterling, rock-based musicianship, propelling some tracks to the stratosphere-- the gliding luxury of “In the City”, for example-- while leaving others with a garish accent mark (“The Big Push”) on an already drab composition.
Regardless, Caveman isn’t short on efforts to move the band’s sound into uncharted territories. It's the first release for the band as an “all in” musical endeavor and it definitely feels that way. In an age where so many group’s are driven by a sole songwriter/creative force, it’s exhilarating to hear an album that’s almost stubbornly democratic, the confidence that the members of Caveman possess in one another being their most prized asset.
