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Cave In break all the rules

Cellars by Starlight by Sean Richardson

If local hardcore-kids-turned-art-rockers Cave In are about one thing, it's reinventing themselves. Emerging out of the fertile Merrimack Valley all-ages scene in 1995, while they were still in high school, the group bum-rushed the underground with their '97 hardcore-cum-thrash-metal debut, Beyond Hypothermia, on Boston's Hydrahead Records. They got noisier and more experimental on their '98 breakthrough,

Until Your Heart Stops, then did a total 180 with the shimmering hard pop of "Luminance," the lead track from last year's Creative Eclipses EP. With a brand new disc, Jupiter, just out on Hydrahead, and a CD-release show tonight (August 31) at the Middle East, they've moved on yet again -- to "space rock."

"I feel pretty spacy all the time, so it was just inevitable," deadpans Cave In singer/guitarist Stephen Brodsky when I meet with him and guitarist Adam McGrath at Big Burrito in Allston. "When people mimic guitar effects and stuff, it's always like, `Ooh, that sounds spacy.' It's just an easy way to tag this new direction we're trying."

"I think it's just a strange fascination with satellites and planets and rockets," adds McGrath. "I don't think it's anything special."

Sequenced like an old-fashioned double-sided LP and stopping just short of concept-album territory, Jupiter is definitely something special. Its eight tracks are as ambitiously arranged as anything on Until Your Heart Stops, but the band's pop sensibilities -- previously buried under shards of heavy-metal mayhem or saved for the "emo parts" of their songs -- have come to the forefront. And after shocking with his singing skills everyone who heard his solo debut (Expose Your Overdubs, a collection of four-track indie-pop demos released last year on the tiny Virginia label Magic Bullet), Stephen Brodsky has added an ethereal falsetto to his arsenal and stopped screaming altogether.

"I've tried all different kinds of [vocal] things on my four-track at home, on songs no one has to hear," Brodsky explains. "With Cave In, I just started trying it [the falsetto]. The guys didn't balk at it too much. I tried to do less falsetto stuff on the record than I had originally practiced the songs with. I just felt like I wanted the vocals to come across as aggressive as they could without having to scream like a madman like I did on other records."

No screaming. More melodies. Guitar riffs that sting where they used to pummel. The guys have always looked more indie-rock than metal -- now they sound that way too. Jupiter surely won't be metal enough for some fans of Cave In's earlier work, but the band aren't worried. "When we started writing songs after Until Your Heart Stops, some songs were heavier and none of us was into playing them," says McGrath. "There was no groove, no excitement. The four of us were like, `Yeah, we don't want to do this anymore. Let's play what we want.' "

"It's all about us trying different concepts of writing music for every record that we do," adds Brodsky. "Part of the goal of writing a record like Until Your Heart Stops was to take a lot of influences by bands that weren't metal and mix them in with sounds that were metal to make a very aggressive record. With Jupiter, I think we wanted to keep the same aggression that we had from older songs, but mixed with our love for bands like Radiohead and Failure. And I don't feel we lost that much aggression, if any at all."

He's right. Although Brodsky and McGrath have traded their chunky death riffs for darkly intertwined melody lines, the rhythm section has barely altered its attack from the group's metal days. Drummer John-Robert Conners still hits with hardcore fervor; bassist Caleb Scofield still favors a growling, distorted tone. And despite its spacy sonic intricacies, Jupiter was recorded almost entirely live in the studio: working with producer Brian McTernan at the Outpost in Stoughton, the band finished the basic tracks in just four days. Proud as they are of the wide spectrum of sound they were able to create using just guitar, bass, and drums, the guys bristle when I jokingly suggest they should have pulled a Boston/Rage Against the Machine and put a "no synthesizers used" disclaimer in the liner notes.

"Well, maybe we should have on the last EP," Brodsky acknowledges, "because lots of people in their reviews of the EP would say, `Cave In, messing around with keyboards,' and stuff -- and there was no keyboard on the Creative Eclipses EP. But whatever. I like to think of Jupiter as a live Cave In record in the studio. The songs still sound good for what they are without too many other additives. I think it sounds better than any of our other records. The quality's a lot better."

Jupiter is the first Cave In record written as a four-piece. Until two years ago, they always had a hardcore screamer up front and used Brodsky as second vocalist; and some of Until Your Heart Stops was written with singer Dave Scrod. "It's great to have a record that was written by the four of us," says McGrath. "There's nothing haunting us from the past. It's finally something that's a perfect representation of us right now." Some of the old stuff is apparently so haunting the group refuse to play it in concert anymore. When I profess a lingering admiration for Beyond Hypothermia, Brodsky responds, "Good, 'cause that's the only time you'll ever hear it again -- on the CD. Actually, I was thinking: we have a CD player that we use live to play stuff in between songs while we take years to tune. We might get a second one to play the old CD when people start requesting old songs."

There's no question the group's songwriting skills have evolved beyond the hardcore sloganeering of Beyond Hypothermia and the violent impressionism of Until Your Heart Stops. Jupiter is a dense, complicated album, full of grandiose, Radiohead-style epics with discernible pop choruses and even a smattering of acoustic guitar. With its slamming intro and quiet space-age guitar interlude, "Big Riff" is both the heaviest and the lightest song on the album, culminating in a big, classic-rock-style solo from Brodsky. "Innuendo and Out the Other" is their "Subterranean Homesick Alien" -- an oblique narrative that drifts in and out of focus until it yields to the twisted bounce of "Brain Candle," the most immediately catchy track. Without getting too literal, Brodsky touches on the space theme in the lyrics to the title track and "New Moon," the latter of which slowly rises to a clamor and eventually brings the disc to a calm resolution.

Cave In will play regional shows this fall before heading out on tour in January, working around McGrath's senior year at UMass Boston, where he's an English major. ("I'm pretty excited about getting done," he grumbles.) Meanwhile, Hydrahead and its sister label, Tortuga, will be releasing several other Cave In-related recordings in the near future, including Kid Kilowatt's Guitar Method, a long-delayed, emo-leaning one-off featuring Brodsky on guitar and vocals, McGrath on bass, and Converge's Kurt Ballou on guitar. Old Man Gloom, the local avant-metal all-star outfit that bassist Scofield plays in alongside Hydrahead/Isis main man Aaron Turner and Converge guitarist Nate Newton, have recorded the follow-up to Meditations in B, their Tortuga debut from earlier this year. Also imminent is the release of Brodsky's second solo album, Static Intellect, which he recorded with McTernan a few months prior to Jupiter. More refined than his debut, it's a lush-sounding singer/songwriter affair in the vein of one of his heroes, Elliott Smith.

"It's more of an album, as opposed to a collection of songs," he says, comparing Static Intellect with his first solo disc. "I wrote all the songs at one point. The mood of the music is more consistent. It came at a nice time, because there were some ideas and sounds that I really liked on my solo record that I tried to incorporate into Jupiter. That's where trying to fuse acoustic guitar with electric came from. There's a lot of that on my solo record."

Although Brodsky and McGrath are happier with Jupiter than with anything else they've done, they feel they've only begun to experiment in the studio. "We'd like to record for a big period of time as opposed to the brief spurts of recording time we've used to do older records," says Brodsky. "We're very interested in the way bands write and record their records."

"We just always record when it's convenient," adds McGrath. "I'd like to record some place far away, where we're not worried about stuff at home. Some place where we could just sit out with all these electronic goodies at our hands to do whatever we want with. I want to try to do a song at a time and try different ways of recording songs. You know -- move the drums to the other side of the room or put them in the basement. Have our amps on the roof or something."

"We're going to try to get J.R. [drummer Conners] to record on the ceiling," quips Brodsky.

"Like Led Zeppelin or something," continues McGrath. "That's the stuff we're fascinated with. We just want to try everything."

Cave In perform tonight, August 31, at the Middle East. Call 864-EAST.

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