Cave - Psychic Psummer (Important, 2009)

At their best, Chicago's Cave boil down familiar but disparate branches of psychedelic rock into a sludgy yet nimble whole. Their first album approached different modes like a kid in a candy store, dipping into heavy riffs, hypnotic repetition, and howling noise, but it sprinted and lagged, never pacing itself as expertly as the band does now. Psychic Psummer is comparatively a less-immediate listen, but it is a deeper and ultimately more rewarding one. It's less of a wrecking ball and more of an assured roll, tumbling like an enormous slow-moving boulder through the band's diverse brand of burly and blissed-out space-rock.

As a mostly-instrumental album, there's a lot of tension and release in these songs, as well as healthy doses of repetition. But Cave continually toy with and subvert these familiar methods in ways that are as cathartic as they are clever. Opener "Gamm" bores through space with its reverberating vocals and windmill guitar strums, veering between explosiveness and a quieter, tenser lockstep martial beat, before ending on a lower-tempo sigh of relief. "Made in Malaysia" is a faster and more surprising follow-up, with a frantic Morse-code keyboard pattern that the band follows in vicious syncopation before bowing into some monstrous circular riffs. There's still a drifting chill-down moment, as with many Cave songs, but it's with a more nervous pulse, pushed by the occasional vocal provocation.

The loping beat, skittering percussion, and robot keyboards of "Encino Men" sounds as good-naturedly goofy as that the name evokes. The moments of release here and throughout the record are muscular without being obvious, and with vintage organ and guitar tones as dry as the band's mouths after some bong-delivered inspiration. Speaking of which, "High, I Am" ironically winds up a bit more straightforward than most of Psychic Psummer. Its groove is solid and taut and driven by domineering bass and toms, and squirts of keyboard and percussive weirdness make it sound like an underwater level of any 16-bit video game.

The band plays themselves out with placid Moog tone and loose drumming of "Machines and Muscles", ending in a simple, satisfying denouement. The album doesn’t out-freak their peers, but nor does it mean to; Psychic Psummer takes the creative restlessness of the band's debut a step further into something much more linear, and rides the line between the studious and the sublime like an act that’s been around much longer than a couple years. It takes an immense amount of structuring and sweat on their end for you to drift away on yours, and the result is so seamless they make it look easy. -from Pitchfork.com

This has been one of my favorite acquisitions lately, a truly heady slice of psych rock, suckled on the nectar of psych-heroes that have come before, grown strong, confident, adaptable. A real beast! I hear strains of Krautrock (Can, Neu!, etc.), mainly in the hypnotic repetetive motor-beat; hear a touch of Suicide, in their overdriven garage synths; can see a flash of Lightning Bolt in their spastic breakdowns and monotonous pummeling; can watch the graceful sway of Tortoise in their jazzy syncopation. Psychic Psummer is well versed in Minimalist theory, letting the parts grow and swell over time, yet it remains driving and focused.
The performances are inspired, their musical tastes are well-developed, the album is short and sweet and will leave you gasping for more. In short, this album fucking rock. This is a band on the rise, one to watch out for. Get this now! and let it be the soundtrack to yr evolution.

Psychic Psummer

*now the link's really fixed, i swear!