The Cave Singers - Invitation Songs

by Jon Fletcher

North West newcomers win hearts with some southern soul

"This is folk music through and through and it has a directness that will speak to almost everyone"

They may hail from Seattle, but the roots of The Cave Singers’ sound lie far further south. It doesn’t take the video of ‘Dancing On Our Graves’ – a scratchy black and white montage of scenes that could have come straight out of O Brother Where Art Thou – to evoke the spirit of southern foot stomping evangelism. Every track on ‘Invitation Songs’, the band’s debut album released this week on Matador Records, seems to echo with the memory of dusty cotton fields. This is folk in the very truest, least pretentious, least navel gazing sense of the word.

The band’s sound centres on singer Pete Quirk’s distinctive, nasal vocals, which lend the music a raw emotional power. This is demonstrated quite amply in the opening section of ‘New Monuments’; Quirk’s solo is totally captivating, packed full of a nervous, menacing tension that draws you in.

That’s not to say that the music is an irrelevance; indeed much of the pace of ‘Invitation Songs’ comes from the crackling washboard percussion and simple but perfectly balanced guitar refrains. ‘Royal Lawns’ gains a mellow autumnal thoughtfulness, while ‘Dancing On Our Graves’, uses the same riff throughout to give the song a shuffling urgency that you might normally associate with a dance track. It’s hard not to hear a superb house remix waiting in the wings.

It may be that breadth of vision that ultimately gives The Cave Singers their lasting appeal. This is folk music through and through and it has a directness that will speak to almost everyone. From Quirk’s opening waver as he sings “Oh my darling” on ‘Seeds Of Night’, ‘Invitation Songs’ feels like an album that generously shares its warmth, making its stories your stories. That’s a pretty hard thing to resist.

Be the first to comment on this article