Print, Reviews March 16, 2019

Album Review: Slow Caves – falling

by Ryan Murphy

Slow Caves didn’t waste any time making an impression on Colorado music listeners. In 2015 — well before they could legally buy a beer at the bar just across the room — the Fort Collins-bred act unleashed a fit of youthful exuberance upon an unsuspecting Underground Music Showcase audience so powerful they broke the tiny Irish Rover stage, immediately cementing their place among an exciting new generation of local performers. In the years that followed, they would release two EPs, Slow Caves and Desert Minded, demonstrating not just a knack for performative mayhem, but also a precocious adroitness for layering unconventionally satisfying, key-defying melodies atop their raucous mid-tempo march.

On March 22, Slow Caves will release their long-awaited debut full-length, falling, on Cincinnati’s Old Flame records—an eleven-song suite of the chillest right-crosses to the thorax you will find committed to wax in 2019. Brothers Jakob and Oliver Mueller split lead vocals throughout; but like their previous releases, the album’s most arresting moments occur when the two combine Zords to take on soaring choruses, coalescing their croons and yelps into a mighty hero that vanquishes all comers.

With the help of Austin-based producer, Chris “Frenchie” Smith (…And You Will Know Us by The Trail Of Dead, Toadies, Meat Puppets), Slow Caves finds itself at its most instrumentally adventurous, dabbling with supplementary synths and strings, and scaling down at the album’s delicate acoustic midpoint, “Andy Warhol,” before gearing up for the record’s powerful second act. falling isn’t a significant deviation from the sound fans of Slow Caves have come to love, but it’s a notable milestone in their growth and subtle reminder of how much potential this still-young band has yet to tap.

Slow Caves will celebrate the release of falling on March 23 at Denver’s Globe Hall with One Flew West and Seattle’s Gastalt.