Psychedelic Rock and the Continuing Rebirth/Death Spiral of New Orleans
Dread-locked, facial-tattooed crusties wearing ragged t-shirts and long cut-offs lounge about in the middle of a dead-end, Mid-City street on a sweltering June evening, drinking forties and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. The occasion: the Chicago-based psych-rock band Cave. The venue: an all-ages collective known as Nowe Miasto, Polish for “new town.” The irony of anything being called new town in New Orleans is compounded by the look of the place. The name might as well mean “condemned pile of kindling.” I’m not sure what to expect for an alcohol policy, but this being New Orleans, there is no policy. Informed by the door-youth that an opening band is on and that Cave will be playing shortly, I wander across Broad for beer. Despite the Latin population never officially exploding in New Orleans as once predicted, the neighborhood around the intersection of Broad and Canal has become the closest thing New Orleans may ever have to a inner-city Latino neighborhood. Could this be the new town? Once back I join the crowd in the street and drink High Life tall boys as the sun goes down, scents of clove cigarettes and body odor mingling with the sticky asphalt in the heavy twilight.
A glimpse of the front cover of Cave, Psychic Psummer, reveals that something psychedelic lurks within. In the notebook-style illustration, drenched in primary color, a snake uncoils from the winged head of a beast that rises from a bottle containing a swan. Other lines morph into other shapes that drip into waves that emanate from an intricately fringed orb in the center—a visual feast that recalls the Axis, Bold as Love heyday of sun-dazed cover art. An examination of the back and inside covers reveals another thematic strain, something distinctly underground. The cut-out graphics—drawings superimposed on photographs, distorted mirror images—the dearth of information, song titles run together, band name and title indistinguishable, all hint of the earliest days of post-punk, independent album art—albums like Sister, Alien Soundtracks, Meat Joy. The visual motif of the album is not perfunctory. It serves as a compliment to the sound within—an organic stew of seventies-style space rock and stiff avant experimentalism. A sound that is equal parts warm acid sunshine and cold underground introspection.
Inside the Nowe Miasto, layers of ancient dust are hidden only by the almost total absence of light. Instead one can only feel the grime, as the heat and lack of ventilation team with the dust to instantly form a pore-clogging layer on the skin. The fuzzy, sweaty conditions, and a handful of vitamin C, would have been useful trip-enhancers had I been holding any mushrooms. Maybe fifteen years ago. Now though I’m relegated to crush the last of my tall boys as the band begins. They play on the floor of the room, surrounded on one side by a makeshift wooden platform and spare beams, and on the other by a broken wall that tries to hide a ceiling-high pile of boards. The group centers themselves in a tight cluster, surrounded by a wall of speakers and amps. The two keyboardists flank either side, one standing and one sitting. The one standing, with long hair and a huge blond beard, resembles a Sunflower-era Mike Love. The bass player stands front and center, a tall young man wearing some kind of paisley halter top. The guitarist stands with his back to the crowd. And the shirtless drummer, a baby-faced kid who looks like he could be sixteen, takes the traditional drum spot in the back.
From the moment they begin they are mesmerizing, and the sound is massive. As on Psychic Psummer, the songs build from a basic rhythm, established by the drums and bass, then riffed on and explored by the group. The bass, somewhat buried on the disc, assumes a lead role live with an intense, gut pounding tone that propels the group forward. The guitar, more primary on the disc, takes a more complimentary role, with the guitarist along with the standing keyboardist adding heavily-processed vocal screams and flourishes to the mostly instrumental sound. The keyboards add Moog-like swirls, sometimes dancing around the rhythm, sometimes pounding directly on it. The highlight of the group’s live presentation, though, is the young drummer—a wiry, flailing knot of frenetic energy with a flying mop of black hair that enhances his rapid yet controlled movements.
The opening track of Psychic Psummer, “Gamm” establishes the mode of the album. A simple, clean guitar riff, underscored by Moog accents, stretches out for a few bars, then explodes into high-pitched wailing before settling into a staccato shuffling gallop. The gallop escalates into a crescendo with massive drum rolls and cymbal crashes. The crescendo then settles into a shuffle that streams off into silence, tailed by whistling feedback. The structure and pace are organic, moving fluidly between sonic peaks and valleys, much in the manner of the iconic Can albums, Monster Movie and Tago Mago. But Cave are younger and noisier, steeped as much in the disturbed, unsettling distortion of bands like The Cows and Steelpole Bathtub, as they are in the seventies mold of blissful space exploration. They are willing to ascend faster, climb higher, and to pile layer upon teetering layer, at already dizzying heights. Their sound is thick and beefy, satisfying at a gut level.
The crowd is unsure at first, trying to make sense of the enormous wall of sound that has suddenly filled the space. Then, after a few songs the pulsating, almost tribal rhythms take over and some begin to move, slowly at first before breaking into full giddy circular movements. Some jump up and down. Others swing each other, arms locked around necks. The music of Cave is strange and perhaps unfamiliar for this young crowd. Not the pure distorted aggression of hardcore or metal, not the Celtic or Klezmer-inflected sounds that have taken over the crusty scene of late, and not the wispy, hippy-dippy eclecticism that might normally be associated with psychedelia. This is space rock—lean, muscular, driving hard rock that recalls the explorations of groups like Hawkwind. One of the older guys in the crowd appreciates the group’s stylistic lineage. Standing close to the stage, leaning on a speaker, he yells out in between songs, “That’s some good fucking prog!”
Psychic Psummer maps out the full range of the band’s territory. “Encino Men” slows down, using a syncopated, circular drum beat and thins out the density somewhat, creating room to breathe. Echoed, non-lyrical vocals emerge and descend, apparition-like. “High, I Am” centers on a driving tribal rhythm, accented by Spacemen 3-like keyboard swirls. The final track, “Machines and Muscles” ups the rhythmic ante, introducing an intricate broken shuffle, interwoven with wispy keys reminiscent of the Euro-boutique electronica of Air. The track shifts midway into a different mode, to a simple guitar-and-bass-driven riff that brings the listener back to where the album began.
Each song in the hour set is long, each taking its time, building and exploring the rhythm, reaching a peak intensity with the entire group pounding together on the riff, before easing back down. But the group raises the intensity level for the final song of the set. Built on a simple pulsating bass line, the rhythm of the final song is more intricate, more syncopated, the drum part a circular pattern that incorporates the entire kit. The peak of this song is especially dense and noisy, the intensity level, once arrived at, sustains beyond what came before, beyond comfort. The group wields their power and their control over the crowd, reveling in the dense center of their sonic maelstrom. The drummer becomes a blur of motion, bashing the set and crashing the cymbals with abandon, furious yet controlled. When the intensity ebbs and Cave pull their ship into dock, the crowd exhales along with them, elated and spent. We exit into the humid air, excited and trembling. The city is not safe. But as groups splinter off down dark streets, the warm reverberations of the music create the false sense of comfort needed to sustain them through the night.