Written by Kep
Cave Moth – In Memory Eternal
> Grindcore/black/screamo
> East coast, US
> Releasing March 29
> Independent/self-release
After the first time I listened to In Memory Eternal, I took two or three days before listening to it again. In that two or three days, I asked myself “Should I review this?” on more than one occasion, because In Memory Eternal sounded very little like the Cave Moth I thought I knew. I eventually decided that yeah, I should, and finally gave it a second listen with ears as wide open as possible. It was (and has been several times again) an eye-opening experience, to say the least.
(In Memory Eternal isn’t yet listed on Cave Moth‘s Bandcamp page, but once it is we’ll update this space with a link.)
I discovered and fell in love with Cave Moth last year with the release of their most recent EP Paralytic Love, which I wrote about in one of our monthly roundups. I also checked out some of their back catalogue—a slightly confusing endeavor considering that the Cave Moth Bandcamp page seems to house music for some of its members’ other projects as well—and particularly dug their 2014 EP The Black Lodge. Now, I’m gonna be honest here: I didn’t even read the EPK when I saw it in my inbox. In my excitement to hear new Cave Moth I just clicked, downloaded, and listened as soon as I could. So imagine my surprise when instead of the frenetic mathgrind I expected, the first thirty seconds of In Memory Eternal turned out to be far more black metal than math, and the following thirty seconds went full emo/post-hardcore.
That’s right, Cave Moth has taken an unexpected turn straight into a blackened emo grind-adjacent land, though they haven’t left their roots behind. The runtime is still extremely brief—four tracks in a scant 11 minutes—and they make use of noise and ambient textures, something they did notably on The Black Lodge, though those elements are far more prevalent here. A sense of barely-controlled chaos still permeates as well, though here the chaos seems more emotional in nature than functional. With that brevity and that signature turbulent approach, there’s no denying that DIY grind is the foundation, but the sound is remarkably different: far less technical and mathy, more raw, less bottom end, with frontman Daniel Quinn eschewing his death growls for a consistently higher and hoarser tone.
The EP’s first two tracks “In Memory Eternal” and “In Memoria Aeterna” have similar frameworks, opening with a few moments of pulsating chords before launching into screams and blasting, then giving way to swooping screamo cleans that hit with a pang of nostalgia and sadness, courtesy of guest contributor Sweet Creem. “In Memoria Aeterna” is the more immediate of the two, coming across a bit more riffy and launching into its cleans earlier. Quinn’s throat-shredding screams are passionate, embracing the rawness of black metal along with the unapologetic transparent emotion of emo. Both tracks sit around 2:30 of runtime, and in both cases the “song” portion has run its course by about 1:30, leaving a final minute worth of noise and ambience. Third track “Thomism”—a reference to the “truth-centric” philosophical system based on the writings of Thomas Aquinas—flips the script a bit, bursting straight into dissonant sustained tremolos with haunting strains of inner melody against punchy roars, eventually ending up in a place that sounds a bit like blackened metalcore. The song flies over atmospheric black metal to its final clean wails, a brief burst of melody that’s over as quickly as it started.
Fourth and final track “A Zoo Story” is no song at all; rather, it’s a noise-enhanced selection of excerpts from Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, a particularly famous two-man stage play in the American canon. We listen to the two characters monologue with increasing urgency about the interpersonal contact and loneliness and the need to feel needed while mechanical jabs, snaps, and thumps add punctuating violence in the background. It’s not your average way to end a release, but it will make you think, and it will ask you to connect the musical dots to the thematic ones. The drawn out screams; the hoarse desperation; the melancholy chord progressions, devoid of Cave Moth’s usual frenetic mathy complexity; the strange plaintive melodies; the grinding noise that scrapes and pulses abrasive connective tissue between each of the tracks, creating a single piece of raw art across 11 minutes. This EP tackles existential loneliness, mental frustration, and aching loss, though if you’re like me it won’t start to really crystallize until that final track.
THE BOTTOM LINE
I’ve already written more words about this mini-album than I expected to, so to be brief: In Memory Eternal is surprising, in a very good way. Pushing beyond Cave Moth’s expected subgenre boundaries musically and into the philosophical gray thematically, it’s a highly enjoyable bite-sized listen that’s very much worth your time.