Gig Review: Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together at a Cave In Concert And Grooving in the Pit - Cave In Live in NZ for the first time!
Remember Gig Reviews? I do. I am dedicated - somewhat foolishly - to bringing them back!
Cave In
Wednesday June 12
Valhalla, Wellington
They were pumped. Audience and band both. It was the first ever New Zealand show by Cave In. Wellington first, then Auckland. The metalcore band, fusing hardcore punk and aspects of metal — but let’s just call them a big ole, dirty rock’n’roll band that could turn on a dime — formed, igneous-style in 1995, solidification occurred with the release of their first records in the late 1990s. There’s been a bust-up, a death, and following hiatus they’re back on the road with a new album, new bassist, and some of the power of the back-catalogue still to boast.
There are OG fans that quite like (or even love) the new album, and there are new fans still working through the full catalogue. All were welcomed, and the band cleverly plays to all by starting the set with a lot of material from 2022’s Heavy Pendulum.
Album opener New Reality is the set-opener too, and it’s sludgy, and rides on the riff, and though it announces new bassist Nate Newton, it was co-written with the band’s original bassist and vocalist, Caleb Scofield (R.I.P. 2018). So I liked the idea that this sends the show out in respect to him.
Stephen Brodsky’s vocals powered most of the evening, with Newton adding bottom end to the vocal as well as the rhythm section, and Adam McGrath (rhythm guitar) wasn’t singing lead on anything tonight (no Reckoning) but he was also giving some BVs to the mix.
Blood Spiller was next (as it is on the album too) and the band was sounding fully ferocious sound. A few years ago there were drummer-jokes galore. Anyone noticed they dried up a decade and a half ago, around the time everyone caught up and realised that the truly great bands are powered by extraordinary drummers. And this is most definitely the case with Cave In. John-Robert (“JR”) Conners is no-fills, but plenty of fills — and always in the right places. He is like a less jazzy Jimmy Chamberlin, muscular as Matt Cameron, and with an ability to let the band’s atmospherics fill the space — the swell and squelch of bass, the throb and gristle of the guitar riffs, and a bit of growl from the vocal. It’s all given space to operate in and around the power-lifting that Conners provides.
Nightmare Eyes, Careless Offering, and Blinded By A Blaze all followed from Pendulum: The way Nightmare played a wee trick with speed-metal, slowing it right down; the way Careless Offering is anything but, both an ominous riff to drive it and a great melody to hook us all in; the way Blaze had that classic slow-circling creep of a stoner-rock/grunge guitar trope, and a softly soaring vocal and then into the lurching swagger of the song; the way the band just served up these new songs as if classic rock for the fans from way back, and the songs fit the shape.
And then we were taken way back. First to the turn of the millennium alt-metal of 2000’s Jupiter for its title track, then Innuendo and Out The Other. Live, these songs had far more kick than I remember from the records. But it was Joy Opposites from 2003’s Antenna that provided the first huge highlight for me. Just absolutely everything firing. And not that it arguably wasn’t already, but just a better capturing of it all, frankly a better song. The vocal soaring, the guitar supporting, Conners pinging off the cymbals and all but climbing right up into the toms.
It was back to Jupiter for the big riff of, well, Big Riff, which was another highlight — and had some impressive vocal screams.
And just like that it was over. Last song. The absolutely stonking Sing My Loves from 2011’s White Silence. The band signposting that it would be a goodie, a way to exit. And they weren’t wrong. From the slow build of guitar squal and a momentum-gathering drum groove, then into the punch of the song, only to fall away a solid eight minutes later into a frenzy of sword-crossing guitar melodies.
Cave In isn’t really metal at all, but has all of the intensity of it — they’re one of those bands like Swervedriver, like And You Shall Know Us By The Trail of Dead, like Sparta, where there’s something mercurial mixing with the metal; the compounding music is transcendent, out of all worlds. And Cave In built the set perfectly to that frenzy.
They didn’t seem like they’d be an encore-kind-of-band. But they also didn’t seem like they’d leave their first Kiwi audience hanging. So, indeed, they were back to give us Off To Ruin from 2005’s Perfect Pitch Black, and then to one of their more pure-metal moments, Moral Eclipse, the opening song off their 1998 debut, Until Your Heart Stops. This has the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal-derrived guitar trills, and the riffage of 80s thrash, and that composite of styles that Mike Patton mined so well for his time across Faith No More and into some of his other projects.
Goddamn, what a fucking tight, brilliant show!
