Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff
Sat 2 Apr
words: NOEL GARDNER photos: ADAM CHARD / CROATOANDESIGN.CO.UK
Over the decades, lots of great and fascinating music has been made by artists who sincerely wanted to strike it big with their particular artistic vision, but didn’t because they got some crucial detail wonderfully wrong, or just weren’t built for mass public consumption. New York band Cold Cave are descendants of lots of acts like this, especially ones who played synthesisers and were extremely catchy as well as being just gloomy. Goths, then. But also folks who get described (in record collector dork circles) as ‘coldwave’ or ‘minimal synth’. They were misunderstood in their day, and took years to get their due; maybe they never even knew once it happened.
In an undersold Cardiff audience – the top floor is maybe a third full on a Saturday night – one watches Cold Cave plough through their set and wonders if their destiny is to be a band like this. Now more than previously – on their second album Cherish The Light Years, out this week, more than 2009 debut Love Comes Close – they appear to be harbouring ambitions of some sort of break for the border. A large degree of their sound now suggests bands who actually bothered the charts: New Order, The Cure and Depeche Mode, given a ‘retro-modern’ studio sheen (which has led a few folks to hear a Killers-y sanitisation in their bombast – incorrectly, in this reporters’ opinion, but still). Their production values count for little onstage, however, and it shows from the start. The Great Pan Is Dead, the opening song on Cherish The Light Years, is a hysterically busy and sound-stuffed song on disc, but can’t be replicated by a guitar, a drumkit and a few keyboards – although it probably sounds fine to anyone in the audience who’s not heard the album yet.
As a live draw, Cold Cave don’t exactly do end-of-the-pier levels of audience interaction. Wesley Eisold, the vocalist and main brain behind the CC ‘concept’, wears one of those silly loosely-knitted jumpers popularised by Robert Smith, and is a little more animated than the gloom suffusing most of his songs might suggest, but still says very little and seems locked in his own little world. Synth player Dominik Fernow, Eisold’s most regular musical wingman, fills the short gaps between songs with bursts of abrasive white noise – a nod to his long-running solo project as Prurient, which has released dozens of records’ worth of the same.
They play their silliest song, Alchemy And You, with the ska-y brass parts pre-recorded and amusingly ersatz; they play Icons Of Summer, Pacing Around The Church and some choice bits of Love Comes Close, such as The Laurels Of Erotomania (Eisold, if nothing else, has obviously put some goth research in when it comes to songtitles). It’s the sort of music aided greatly by volume, which Clwb Ifor Bach amply provides, and the minimal red lighting doesn’t hurt the… mystique either. People dance, and while you doubt few will recall this as a classic gig in years to come – certainly not the band themselves – Cold Cave do enough to stop this being the damp squib that might have threatened.
Credit for this should also go to Man Without Country, the Cardiff-based trio who support tonight; they have at least as many people watching them as Cold Cave, and while their style of synth-driven rock is more avowedly 21st-century than the headliners, they combine jarring beats with whirry FX pedal ambience and large indie-rock hooks. Oh, and dry ice that entirely obscures their drummer throughout the set.
