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Cavity: Supercollider

12/11/09 || Khlysty

Density and groove: that’s the name of the game here, if you don’t like it…, well, tough luck. Cavity came from the miasmic land of old people, dope dealers and gators, Florida and their chosen genre was the nice and happy-puppy sludge-doom that we all love to hate, especially if one is a Manowar fan. I mean, what’s to like here? The music is a monolithic slab of feedback-laden misanthropic noise, the vocals are hate-filled screamo-shouto bursts, the drummer seems to come right out of the Stone Age, armed with two human femurs and a bloodlust and the whole package drips venom, cheap whiskey, poverty and psychosis. Nice compo, right?

Well, you know, the above paragraph is, in all actuality, half of the truth. The four –or, at one time or another, five- guys that were members of Cavity were extremely talented mofos. They took upon their –scrawny or burly, doesn’t matter- shoulders the duty of turning a basically dead-end sub-genre (sludge is your basic heroin-fucked-up Sabbath worship) into something that could be much more interesting and unpredictable, adding here and there measured doses of groove, experimentation and, even (ulp!!!) swing and swagger. As a result, their music is NOT your basic Dixie-fried, moonshine-damaged dirge of Eyehategod or Crowbar, but a beast with its own personality and quirks.

Take, for example “Supercollider”, the song which opens this fucker of a record: after a few seconds of pure noise, the band comes crashing with such force that would make even Neurosis proud. BUT, the song’s also groovy as all-fuck, calling for a moshpit bigger and bloodier that anything any band has ever dreamed of. And that’s not the end of the story; see, the band kills the groove three minutes in, letting instead the sludge cover everything, like slow-moving shit-lava, while the guitars, far from being lazy, are adding nuance and character to the whole suffocating riffage. And what do they follow this behemoth with? A neither-here-nor-there slow hardcore track, that fucking swings, while annihilating everything in its path, and it’s gone in a two-minutes burst.

And that’s how Cavity operates here: never afraid to mix and mesh stuff (the psychedelic guitar lick in “Taint and Abandon” is so cool I wet meself just thinking of it), never going for the deep end of doomology, never fearing a little groove even during their most strung-out moments, while, all the time, being focused on the goal of creating music of such density that if one plays it a little louder, his speakers will bite it for good –y’ know, burst woofers, melted wiring, the works. Everything here speaks of meticulous, preplanned action, with great care in orchestration, pacing and execution. This is not the accumulated bong-wisdom of some burn-outs with Sabbath-worshiping obsessions, but a really organized slab of sludgy psychosis.

I have to add that the phenomenal production –fucking LISTEN to the drums and then tell me about great drum recordings!- gives everything a nasty, acid-enema urgency, even when the band crawls. This is as good as it gets when one wants to dip his head into really inspired human-hating sludge. Go get it and lose your mind…

8,5

Information
Released: 1999
Label: Man’s Ruin (2001 Hydra Head Records re-issue)
Website: none
Band
Ryan Weinstein: guitar, piano
Daniel Gorostiaga: bass
Anthony Vialon: guitar, vocals
Henry Wilson: drums

Tracklist
01. Supercollider
02. Set in cinders
03. Taint and abandon
04. Inside my spine
05. Xtoone
06. Threshold
07. Black snake
08. Damaged IV
09. How much lost
10. Last of the final goodbyes
11. …Who doesn’t even know yet?

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