Zozobra
Harmonic Tremors
Hydra Head
By Jose Fritz
When I think of the state of rock today, I think of the old rock gods and what they must think looking down at what their child hath wrought. It’s hard to imagine God, but easy to imagine a rock god. I imagine Lemmy from Motorhead, picturing his disembodied floating face twisted up, sneering and with a furrowed brow. He contemplates change but is unable to measure it.
It is gratifying for a great grandfather to see yet more grandchildren, but as the generations are separated by cultural gaps, he cannot understand it all. I see him rubbing his warty head and squeezing the red one on the end yielding a little puss, a little blood and a smidgen of communicable fungal spore.
He recalls vaguely the 50-foot effigy named Zozobra, burned every year by a hysterical mob during the Fiestas De Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was unconscious on the tour bus at the time, but he heard tell of it after. In his omniscience he also knows that Zozobra is the brainchild of former Cave In bassist Caleb Scofield.
Cave In had its own troubling growth. They began as brutal, harsh and heavy as they come and then suddenly fell in love with prog-rock and mastered its dark art over night, dropping a bomb named “Jupiter” on the world. A song named for another god, one more massive and powerful than Lemmy, but one that doth not ever concern himself with new rock music. Cave In wrote and recorded music after “Jupiter,” but it didn’t matter. We ceased to listen, and then they ceased to play.
Things got depressing, some fans required therapy; others went into withdrawal and were forced to undergo sodium ambutal therapy to prevent reoccurrence. Then Stephen Brodsky put out a record called Octave Museum that was so embarrassingly bad that everyone in Pennsylvania pretended not to know him. The lovefest was over, and 12-step program completed.
Harmonic Tremors breaks this silence, and takes unequal parts from late and early Cave In among other far-reaching extremities. The album is simultaneously promising and concerning. “Soon to Follow” is crushingly heavy and are derivative of a number of bluesier practitioners like Godzero or even Cavity. “Silver Ghost” loses itself in guitar hum, resonance and a general lack of clarity, and some of these other cuts don’t coalesce into the strong thematic pieces they could while also lacking the brevity of a proper intermission.
Space rock has its place in the world for sure, but it’s not here. Most of the record feels more like unfinished ideas than genre bending experiments. But certain cuts like “Levitate” or “Caldera” combine the two hemispheres entering that vague “post-sludge” area where Isis lives. It’s not exactly making the record cohesive, but instead indicating there is a clear path out of this muck and back into music greatness. It leaves me with hope that Mr. Scofield will pick up where Cave In left off, and for Lemmy up above, he’s left with little reason to smite thee. Lemmy the all-knowing, the all-seeing is already well-aware of the promising future.
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