Daniel Shoemaker Photos
Perched about head-high on the stage left wall of Cafe Nine, there is a roughly LP-sized wooden frame containing what at first glance looks somewhat startlingly like a ransom note: With its askew, cut and paste lettering, it reads, “make sure your volume is right for the room. THANKS.”
Short of asking whether or not Cave or Mountain Movers noticed the sign, I have no way of knowing, but whether explicitly or intuitively, the two bands responded in very different, but equally valid manners.
Mountain Movers, the ever-popular local psych-rock classicists, took the stage shortly after 9 p.m. on Tuesday, and with little revelry, started chugging their way through a set of characteristically gimmick-free, expansive kosmiche meditations. Their appreciation for their forebears is palpable. You could almost flip through their record collection as they played their way through a set of extended hypnotic grooves. The 13th Floor Elevators drone, Neu!’s metronomic rhythms, Sabbath’s fuzzy fury, Spacemen 3’s stuttering laser-beam leads — they all come together to cook up a nice pot of chicken soup for the stoner rock soul. Aside from Dan Greene’s minimal vocals, a lot of the talking was done by guitarist Kryssi Battalene’s leads. Her tone, wet and heavy with reverb, swam freely inside the perpetual molten flow of the rhythm section (Rick Omonte on bass and Ross Menze on drums), while they interlock with Greene’s spacious playing.
Mountain Movers music, peaceful as it can be, is deceptively loud. It’s the kind of loud that doesn’t seem loud until set break, when listeners are greeted by the familiar hiss of high frequencies vacating one’s hearing range forever. With a set as good as theirs, what’s a few KHz? To my still buzzing ears they sounded “right for the room.”
Had the night ended there, I don’t think I would have heard any complaints (tinnitus notwithstanding). The night, however, did not end there. Cave, the headliner, often sups from the same sonic stew as Mountain Movers, sharing an affinity for modulations and momentum, but they have carved their own unique niche in the musical topography.
Cave’s sound has evolved over the band’s decade-plus career. Starting from a recognizable psychedelic color palette, the musicians — guitarist and organist Cooper Crain, guitarist Jeremy Freeze, bassist Dan Browning, drummer Rex McMurry, and multiinstrumentalist Rob Frye — craft long-form exploratory songs that blur the line between improvisation and composition, always showing restraint, favoring texture over sheen, and above all, they are tight. I’m talking down to the subatomic particle tight. The kind of tight that inspires an impressed smile of disbelief on everyone in a room. The kind of tight that makes you wonder if the members share a root system like those massive pine forests you read about in click-baity National Geographic articles titled things like “Newly Discovered: The World’s Largest Organism.” The kind of tight that journalists spend entire paragraphs struggling to describe. Really. Tight.
In its more recent work — which comprised the bulk of the set — Cave have started skewing subtly toward some more organic Afrobeat-inspired grooves, also trading scratchy synth sounds for softer Rhodes organ‑y tones. The 2013 addition of Frye pushed this evolution even further with his auxiliary percussion, rhythmic sax skronking and aerodynamic flute playing. Despite an early EP entitled Pure Moods, Cave are a lot less ambient and a lot more ambiance. Frye’s flute playing (fluting? flutting? flouting?) might find its closest kin in the percussive, Florian Schneider style of the earliest Kraftwerk recordings.
Cave has a knack for making 10-plus-minute songs feel short. The rhythms evolve constantly and subtly before blasting off into entirely different directions. It’s no coincidence that in preparing for and writing this article my mind has frequently made the Freudian slip of calling them Can. As an outlier in a genre of outliers, Can’s propulsive funkiness has clearly influenced Cave’s work. While they share a couple letters and a similar sonic sprawl, Cave paraphrases but never quotes Can. Cave’s compositions rely heavily on dynamics and gradual tempo shifts to keep listeners ever more enrapt, and they do so expertly. I suspect that a band that can play as deftly at any volume as Cave can sounds right in any room, I’m just happy this one had me in it, and judging by the animated head bobs in an often cross-armed town of musicgoers, I suspect I was not the only one.