Cold Cave: Love Comes Close (Matador)

Cold Cave

Love Comes Close

Matador

Nov 19, 2009 Issue #28 Fall 2009 - Monsters of Folk By John Everhart

Cold Cave frontman Wesley Eisold exudes a downright clinical detachment in his analysis of relationships throughout his band's debut LP Love Comes Close. It's a compelling push/pull struggle of cerebral analysis versus arm's length emotion, largely devoid of histrionics, yet masterfully articulated by Eisold with sheer poetic clarity that differentiates the act from a litany of '80s electro revivalists.

Musically, the record veers recklessly from insidious reveries to downtrodden dirges. Caralee McElroy's (ex-Xiu Xiu) contributions are truly indispensable, as she plays a discreetly gorgeous foil to Eisold's laconic baritone, dazzling on first single "Life Magazine" with her insistent refrain of "I'm never going back" looping and folding in on itself like an infinity symbol, undergirded by synth lines crashing like icicles hitting pavement.

"Hello Rats" is as harrowingly bereft as anything from Joy Division's Closer, finding Eisold admitting without contrition, "You're in bed with a future ex-girlfriend/Telling lies about emotions or something," over an ascetically bare glacial sonic landscape. "Youth and Lust" features a stunning call and response vocal exchange between Eisold and McElroy. As he croons flatly of "Cold sheets and mattress stains," she counters taciturnly, "It's all plastic now/A sympathetic world without end," their deliveries imbued with a stilted sexual tension belying the track's electrified melodic surge.

"Everything changing will unchange again," Eisold urges at the outset of "Love Comes Close," illustrating the overarching paradox at the heart of this fine record. It engenders a resigned assurance that things will eventually return to their right place, despite the sense of tumult and despair ubiquitous throughout. In an icily emotional journey rife with cruel flux, Eisold ultimately finds cold comfort in the inevitability of entropy. (www.coldcave.net)

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