It didn't take long for the back-to-the-barn modus operandi of bands like Bon Iver, Akron/Family, The Acorn and Fleet Foxes to descend, like a slow fall from A-minor to F, into something close to cliché: we're nowadays up to our horn-rimmed specs in beardy minstrel types peeling off into the backwoods to cook up their scratchy, mildly lysergic freak-folk-rock. Seattle’s Cave Singers live in the same neighbourhood, all right, though perhaps just a couple of miles down the track.
The majority of the songs on their third album are circular and trance-like. The two supporting pillars are the gravelly rasp of Pete Quirk (pictured below) and the primal rhythm of Marty Lund (sometimes it's the boom-boom-boom of a heartbeat; at others the soft rise and fall of a breath), but the music's controlling characteristic is the serpentine guitar of Derek Fudesco, twisting around and around these simple songs.
On “All Land Crabs and Divinity Ghosts” it recalls the sound of the west African ngoni, and there's certainly a more exotic range of influences on No Witch than on its predecessor Welcome Joy. “Outer Realms” is built on a rattling tabla rhythm and “Faze Wave”, a dark vortex of mid-1960s bum-trip psychedelia, also glances vaguely towards the East.
They’re heavier than they used to be, too: in a bare-knuckled challenge bout against the Fleet Foxes I'd certainly back this trio every time. “No Prosecution if We Bail” is scuzzy, overloaded riff-rock, a little reminiscent of the late, great Thin White Rope, while “Falls” builds to a chugging gospel-tinged crescendo worthy of prime period Rolling Stones.
But it’s the drowsy, oddly beatific campfire strums of “Distant Sures” and “Swim Club” which - still - define the Cave Singers. The latter finds Quirk asking his lover to "put your cookies in the cooling rack", which is either an endearing snapshot of domestic bliss or an obscure euphemism for something reliably filthy. Which in the end seems a rather apt summation of this record.
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