Early into the debut album from Caracara, frontman William Lindsay lands on a phrase that says a lot about Summer Megalith is a whole: “We felt the lack long after.” Catch that reference and it’s clear that post-hardcore outfit Pianos Become the Teeth is canon for Caracara—especially their beautifully battle-scarred early phase. But that concept of “the lack long after,” that emotional phantom limb syndrome, connects Caracara’s self-described “distorted emotional music” with the numerous other bands Summer Megalith evokes. They might call Wolf Parade, the Antlers, or the Twilight Sad—bands who in retrospect can be heard as emo covert ops—with grandiose, heart-rending, throat-shredding ambition, relentless and implacable in their yearning.
As such, they are not a band that has mastered a single, fully formed aesthetic. Summer Megalith is dynamic and diffuse: Bookended by acidic slowcore and lustrous, gothic folk, it deviates into D.C. post-hardcore and “The O.C.” soft-rock. If it comes off like a survey of every contemporary variant of modern emo, most of it emanates from Lindsay’s voice alone. Early dispatch “Crystalline” took on a whip-smart, nasal tone similar to former Modern Baseball frontman and Summer Megalith co-producer/mixer Jacob Ewald. Together, they slather the album in crackling midrange, making “Burn Me I’m Made of Matches” the most evocatively and accurately named track here. Their earlier single “Glacier” found Lindsay at his most agitated, choking out melodies like Cameron Boucher, the Sorority Noise frontman who is releasing this record on his Flower Girl label.
While stylistically shapeshifting on a track-by-track basis, Summer Megalith keeps a steady emotional center. “If this is being civil, I want to be evil, I want to destroy it all,” Lindsay sighs, his despondent melody doubled by moaning cello. He wants to be evil, but it’s just that—a want that he can’t afford. “At least I got to say that you were mine,” Lindsay mutters as his train leaves the U-Bahn station during “Prenzlauerberg,” doomed to watch a lover’s face endlessly fade out in a dim haze of dissipating memories, drugs, and streetlamps at 4 a.m. Meanwhile, when the guitars drop out on the chorus of “Pontchartrain,” his confessions break through the fog like a blast of cold water: “There’s no point in feeling pain/If you learn nothing.”
Given this unbearable weight of regret, it’s appropriate that the first half of Summer Megalith is filled by crescendos with no climax. “Evil” immolates for five minutes, leaving smoking husk; “Glacier” drops verse-chorus structure for an endlessly upward bridge, an impassioned smear of Mineral and M83. While Caracara’s desire to yearn in the most flamboyant and grand-scale manner stands out amid the Philadelphia house show circuit from which they were born, the production can occasionally feel mismatched. But those concerns are moot during the second half of Summer Megalith, where Caracara and Ewald prove capable of shaping some of the most immediately cathartic indie rock of recent times. “Oh Brother” initially feels like the centerpiece, rejuvenating 2010-era stylistic tics (clacking percussion, galloping folk rhythms, off-mic hollers) to comfort a disillusioned friend before a saxophone solo emerges from a sweltering post-rock coda. Either one would’ve been the most thrilling peak to that point.
Summer Megalith reaches its height on a song called, fittingly, “Apotheosis.” Over a lone guitar, the lyrics speak of broken homes, holy ghosts, a visit to a clinic during the “18th week of pregnancy,” and Lindsay makes a solemn promise to outlast the trauma: “When the world turns the rafters into splinters in our feet/You know that I'll stand by you the way that you stood by me.” The stakes are too high and the ambience too raw and cavernous for “Apotheosis” to stay this quiet for too long. When the guitars, drums, and horns finally do try to bring the house down, Lindsay holds his ground: “We’re created, we’re destroyed/Desperate and overjoyed/I don’t feel this way for anything.” When the time does come for Caracara to feel this way, they feel it all.
