Album Review: Caveman – CoCo Beware

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mp3 – Caveman – Thankful
mp3 – Caveman – Decide

While discovering Caveman this week (via their new release CoCo Beware), I was reminded of a more youthful, easy-to-digest version of recent SC favorites The War On Drugs. With their penchant for repetitive grooves and folky atmospherics, the two must have made a pretty hypnotic pair when they played together at Club Garibaldi a few months back.

The roster of this rising NYC five-piece boasts four vocalists, lead by Matthew Iwanusa. Their harmonies, although rather subtle, are one of the more salient elements on their first release. Pattering drums and melodic bass patterns lend CoCo earthy roots, and are the driving force behind most of its songs. However, this rhythmic core foregrounds dreamier backdrops painted softly in synths, trebly guitars, saw-like feedback, and Iwanusa’s crystalline vocals. All covered, of course, in a healthy coat of reverb. While I’m always skeptical of this approach to production (shared by TWOD, Real Estate, Atlas Sound, Braids) it’s the kind of egalitarian layering that invites repeated listens.

Despite their ambient personality, Caveman does a pretty good job of condensing, and CoCo unfolds more like a pop record than a wandering psych-folk experiment. All of the songs are around three or four minutes long, clocking in at a total time of 35 minutes. And though the overwhelming tendency toward medium tempos and predictable structures can make it hard to distinguish them (the opening moments of “Decide” and “My Time” are almost identical), after a handful of listens each song takes on its own particular character and depth. The songwriting’s not mechanized, but, like The War On Drugs, it does seem married to a certain aesthetic.

Caveman’s songwriting model is on display in the great “Thankful,” with its lonely, half-baked opening chords and chattering percussion, soon joined by a host of lilting vocals and spacy guitars and synths. The song snowballs over the course of its 4 minutes, growing more dense with sound before the drums distort and fade and the ambience bleeds into the next track, “My Room,” in which the process begins anew. It is everything Caveman does well, but it is also everything Caveman does, period. But the relative homogeny of the album may actually be one of its strong points – CoCo Beware is the kind of pleasant, pre-winter balm I crave this time of year.

Caveman’s CoCo Beware is out now via ORG music