EP REVIEW: II – deathCAVE

DEATHCAVE release their first record of the year, two track EP II. Combining their colossal doom sound with new, interesting flavours with their genre melding, the band look to turn heads with their latest creative efforts post-pandemic.

First track The Birch Trees Are Bones comes from a very visceral moment on a psychedelic trip, wherein bass player Michael Freiburger (BRAIN SCRAPER, THRONE OF BONE) was captivated by birch trees. The resulting journey brought together the track, and so the main event of II was born.

It’s undeniably a thick, sludgy experience, with relentless vocals and a sense of menace. The track as a whole has an ebb and flow to it, allowing for moments of variation in the way you feel the anguish DEATHCAVE create. It’s a drilling guitar, a bashing drum and crashing symbol, all melded together in such a way as to compound the intoxicating sound down into your mind. The band’s overall feeling from their previous work is still there, but the elements of black metal that sprout out and fester in the track are something to behold. It’s by the numbers in terms of influences, but again, in combination with what DEATHCAVE already is as a band, it is quite captivating.

Having taken such a blackened approach to doom, the band have allowed the more despairing parts to spread out in new ways. The scream of the strings as they bend, the tension as the waves of melody tremolo over you are perfectly distractive as they are hallucinogenic. The way DEATHCAVE have constructed the song overall becomes more erratic and unhinged as the ending comes near, an animal desperation rising like in the awareness of one’s own impending death.

While this is clearly the magnum opus of the EP, the cover of BLACK SABBATH’s The Writ is equally just as worth listening to. A completely different style to the original track, and to DEATHCAVE’s regular sound, the combination of heavy metal and the more modern doom it inspired works surprisingly well. Way more fuzzed up and beefy than it has any need or right to be, it’s genuinely good fun to listen to what DEATHCAVE do with the vocals especially. It’s creatively punchy for a live performance, but doesn’t lose any of the fun of the original by becoming more doom-tinged.

II is a short but by no means sweet EP, with a festering heart inflected with blackened doom. DEATHCAVE’s penchant for a more psychedelic sound is well crafted with a more black metal influence, making the prospect of more work like this in the future very exciting.

Rating: 6/10

II is out now via Satanik Royalty Records

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