In the middle of their set, Caveman frontman Matthew Iwanusa said it was their first show in LA; it was a packed concert at the Echo on a Thursday night, free with a reservation, that’s true, but considering the number of shows going on in LA every night, it was something to consider. I had never heard of the New York quintet, although I realized they had already built a buzz.
Frontman Matthew Iwanusa was alternating between guitar and an auxiliary drum, and I have seen lots of bands doing this lately, placing an extra drum front stage, to echo and ccentuate the drummer’s (and in this case Stefan Marolachakis) heavy drumming. Beside the omnipresent and prominent beats, the wall of noise produced by Jimmy Carbonetti, Sam Hopkins, and Jeff Berrall, respectively on guitar, keyboard and bass was loud and powerful, venturing into pseudo-psychedelia territory with a lot of fuzziness and distortion. It was a three-layer sound, the elaborated murkiness of the guitar-synth, the drums and bass persisting all along, and the sweet, breezy melodies, strengthened by five-part harmonies, escaping from all this.
Listening to them on record actually gives a tamed perception of their music played live, the dreamy psych landscape is there, but live, they certainly played their gentle, soft pop at a higher level of reverb and distortion, with a lesser or greater extend, depending on the songs.
Curiously, some of their songs were even danceable, as the guy on my right demonstrated, so they were not interested by a sort of shoegazing, rather, their fuzziness, which was neither aggressive nor too hazy, was catchy and upbeat, and full of beats,…just listen to ‘Thankful’!
They played songs from their debut album, ‘CoCo Beware’ – which received praise from NPR, The New York Times (and Pitchfork, in case you care) – like ‘Easy Water’, the bouncy and ooh-ooh-ooh-filled ’A Country’s King of Dreams’, ‘Thankful’, ‘Decide’, the more melancholic ‘Great Life’, the more exotic ‘December 28th, ‘Vampirer’, ending the show with more soothing harmonies with ‘Old Friend’, but also announcing a new song during the set.
On record, Caveman sound a little like Fleetfoxes because of the importance given to the vocal harmonies, live, they definitively blur this picture, with sustained chords, more reverb and distortion, making place for an interesting melodious sound that can evoke many things (it may not be a coincidence that they have a song entitled ‘My Room’, which is just one word away from Brian Wilson’s classic) while leaving a place for experimentation.