A band that once could be described as traipsing through a blissful psych-pop daydream, Elf Power now appear doomed to wander through indie rock purgatory for an eternity. Outliving just about every other original E6 band, they've made a career flirting with both commercial and critical success only to come up empty-handed in relation to their E6 peers. Their mainstream coup, 2004's Walking With the Beggar Boys, eschewed the band's lo-fi safety net in favor of pristine power-pop and unmitigated T. Rex-isms, failing at a genre shift that ironically would prove fruitful in 2007 for fellow E6 elders Of Montreal. So as reparations, fans first received 2006's no-frills Back to the Web and now In a Cave, the tail end of an extended sigh that started after Beggar Boys' glam rock blowout.
Like any Elf Power effort, the songs here are built around frontman Andrew Rieger, and they sink or swim based on his intermittent sparks of creativity. At its brightest, Cave evokes the lysergic escapism of E6's glory days. The meaty bass riff on "Spiral Stairs" gets diluted with vintage fuzz effects and Rieger's consistently sedated delivery, creating yet another gem from the template of Olivia Tremor Control's "The Opera House". The band sounds even fresher when digging through a dusty attic's worth of eccentric instruments and sound effects. Drowsy dirges like "A Tired Army" and "Window to Mars" feel tailor-made for Rieger's unflappable droll, and their disjointed yet catchy melodies-- which are too seldom on this album-- even raise the question of whether or not this band should be doing more drugs.
Working with such a canonized palette, the pressure's constantly on Rieger to transcend his band's stylistic limitations. In the E6 universe, nothing does this better than a Beatles-esque hook. Unfortunately, he's only got a handful to spare on Cave, and for every heart-melting ditty like "Softly Through the Void", he's likely to lull listeners with lazy folk numbers like "The Demon's Daughter" or closer "Midnight Crawls Out". Even worse, the residual effects of Beggar's libidinous strut plague some of the filler tracks here, their hazy boogie beats giving Rieger an excuse not to be as engaging as he could be while sounding way less sexy than needs to.
For all these drawbacks, Cave will still provide a quick fix for psych fans. In fact, they've even managed to exorcise most of the demons from their ill-advised geek glam dabbling. But while Cave represents a return to form, the band hasn't recaptured the beauty of early highlights like When the Red King Comes or A Dream in Sound. Instead, the band churns out another canned acid trip that only hints at E6's salad days, their mind-freeing mysticism stripped away long ago to leave nothing but rote psych manufacturing.
