The post-punk band’s new seven-song collection owes a conspicuous debt to New Order, and while the presentation begs to be called “spooky,” they’re having fun with it.
In 2013, Cold Cave’s Wes Eisold had just released a single called “People Are Poison.” He was detoxing from the bad vibes that surrounded 2011’s Cherish the Light Years, the band’s final release for Matador, and recovering from professional backlash after booking controversial noise artist Boyd Rice as a tour opener. But his own vision of his band’s frosty darkwave sound was more positive, and in the years since, Eisold has tried to bring the two into alignment. Cold Cave downsized, releasing singles at a slow, steady drip on their own Heartworm Press. After years of chaotic personnel shifts, Eisold shares songwriting duties with his wife, Amy Lee; their son Rainer adds childish vocal color and harmonica. Guitarist Anthony Anzaldo is a founding member of Ceremony, a band that traced a similar path from hardcore to gloomy post-punk.
At seven songs and 32 minutes, Cold Cave’s new compilation Fate in Seven Lessons is not quite an album, yet too substantial to qualify as an EP. Each of its seven tracks present an easily identifiable theme (“the New Order one,” “the Depeche Mode one”) to lure the casual observer, promising thrills for all ages and minimal risk. On 2014’s Full Cold Moon compilation, Cold Cave erred towards minimalist and morose, an understandable reaction to Cherish the Light Years’ brickwalled bluster. Fate in Seven Lessons walks a middle path, genuflecting towards goth-pop royalty, establishing a liaison between Cruel World headliners and newer bands who now consider Cold Cave elder statesmen.
Resolutely mid-fi production continues to subdue Eisold’s vocals, blunting the rock-star charisma that separated Cold Cave from their peers, but it no longer feels like penance for having aspired to actual rock stardom. Fate in Seven Lessons recalls Cold Cave’s penchant for wearing all black leather at scorching summer festival dates: the presentation begs to be called “spooky,” but they’re having fun with it. Their idea of post-punk is more New Order than Joy Division, and the gnarly, sawtooth basslines of “Prayer From Nowhere” signal trashy fun rather than menace. The most memorable lyrics play on Eisold’s vampiric image; “I thought substance abuse could be cute/But now I dream of silence and gardens” is wordplay more fitting for a guy wearing an argyle sweater.
Though Fate in Seven Lessons earns its claim to “return to form,” it awkwardly finds itself competing with the very record that broke that form. Later this year, Cold Cave will play tenth anniversary shows for Cherish the Light Years, a collection of roaring, jet-black jock jams that did not make Eisold famous but put him through all of the Behind the Music drama anyway. No other band from this realm has aspired to make an album with its maniacal, moonshot ambition. The aim of Fate in Seven Lessons is more obvious: Modern English’s lawyers might be interested in the chorus of “Love Is All,” while “Happy Birthday Dark Star” takes significant liberties with the Cure’s “How Beautiful You Are.” “Psalm 23” unlocks memories of “The Hearts Filthy Lesson,” or just the general sound of David Bowie and Depeche Mode adjusting to industrial and big-tent electronica. “Night Light” begins in a fog of sustained synths before the sequenced beat drops. There’s probably a half-dozen New Order songs that pulled the same trick, but why deny the most euphoric song Cold Cave have ever written? Their diehard fans know all these references and the band is done trying to court anyone else.
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