Taking Big Bill Broonzy at his word when he said "all music is folk music", THE CAVE SINGERS are a bunch of talented backwoods weirdos who may hail from Seattle but very much take it back to the wide open spaces of rural America with their debut album 'Invitation Songs'.
Comprising Pete Quirk (vocals, guitar, harmonica, melodica), Derek Fudesco (guitar, bass pedals, ex-Pretty Girls Make Graves/ Murder City Devils) and drummer Marty Lund, TCS roped in Colin Stewart (Black Mountain, Pretty Girls Make Graves) to produce over the Canadian border in Vancouver. However, they may as well have had copies of 'The Anthology Of American Folk Music' under their arms when they went up to record as these potent and often broodingly spare songs of lost love, longing and the distance between could easily have been committed to tape sitting in a circle around a dying campfire as summer runs into fall under the starriest of skies.
Opening tune 'Seeds Of Night' gives you a good idea of the kind of thing to expect. Blending subtle finger-picking with Lund's expectant, shuffling drums and Quirk's curiously addictive nasal quiver of a vocal, it's insidious and funkily rustic and - by the time cohort Rob Calder's trumpet serenade has kicked in - you're with them all the way.
Songs seeping through in its' wake confirm the good impression. 'Helen' is an unlikely alliance of the new and ancient (Appalachian, 16 Horsepower-style finger picking sparring with an oddball synth line a la Space's 'Magic Fly') but reveals that Quirk and co. are closet romantics after all ("Helen, your eyes are frozen in my brain/ Helen, you are a gone world where I remain"). This is followed up by the Civil War parade beat and Velvets-y droning of 'Dancing On Our Graves' and vividly musty neo-folk of 'Cold Eyes' before they strike out Eastwards for the fractured rural blues of 'Royal Lawns' where a harmonica wafts about like a hobo jumpin' freight trains and there are even brief glimpses of the past portrayed by the likes of Mississippi John Hurt and Lightnin' Hopkins.
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Unlike many albums where the middle section can often contain filler, 'Invitation Songs' instead holds back a couple of its' key tracks for this portion of the record. 'New Monuments' may just be the very best thing here with its' blues-y lurch of a backdrop (somewhere between Leadbelly's 'In The Pines' and Thee Immortal Lee County Killers), ominous lyrics ("in a house of disrepute where I lost my mind/ the trains were singing high over the blizzards and the pines") and a monumentally basic melodica blast. It's run close by the ensuing 'Oh Christine', though, where battered chords and the rhythm section's lugubrious heartbeat goad Quirk into an especially potent tale of love slipping through his fingers ("you came bearing gifts to the ghosts") which stains your heart for some time afterwards.
OK, the adherence to a live and authentic sound means that a couple of tracks can sound a little stunted and one-dimensional (the repetitive picking, too-loud drums and general sense of going nowhere on 'The Bricks Of Our Home' springs to mind especially), but when they sign off with the chilly, bare bones dirge of 'Called' you're left both exhilarated by this weird, but captivating new musical landscape where the light dances invitingly and the shadows mass portentously in roughly equal proportions.
All things considered, 'Invitation Songs' extends a strange, unfamiliar hand, but it's one you'll probably take and run with regardless of the dangers.
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