Review: Cave In – Heavy Pendulum
“Heavy Pendulum” is less a comeback and more the product of a band calmly re-drawing its own constellation on a much bigger tapestry than before. It is he first “proper” Cave In record after “Final Transmission”, the taped-up farewell letter to Caleb Scofield, and you can hear that absence like a sub-bass frequency under almost everything. “New Reality” doesn’t just open the album; it states the terms of survival, its thick, sludgy riffing and hoarsely melodic vocals serving as both tribute to Scofield and welcome party for Nate Newton (Converge, Doomriders), whose bass tone feels closer to a low-hanging storm cloud than an instrument. Cave In used to lunge between space-rock escapism and hardcore collapse; here they sound rooted, heavier in the literal sense, as if they’ve decided that escape velocity is less interesting than orbiting a painful memory.
The production is a big part of that gravity. Kurt Ballou gives the band a wide, high-contrast frame: guitars are vividly separated yet constantly bleeding into each other, drums land with a leaden inevitability, and the low end swells without ever turning to mud. It is, simply put, one of the best-sounding “big” rock records in recent memory, rich enough to reward obsessive headphone listening but direct enough to make sense at obnoxious volume in a small room.
At 70-plus minutes,” “Heavy Pendulum” is unapologetically bloated – and somehow an album that trusts its own momentum perhaps a little too much. The title track is the mission statement: a lumbering, doom-tinged rocker whose bassline genuinely swings like its namesake, while the guitars etch classic rock filigree around the central riff as if trying to lighten the load. It’s followed and preceded by songs that treat genre less as a boundary and more as sediment: grunge grit settling over classic rock changes, sludge riffing laced with almost pop-like choruses, postcore anxiety smuggled into stadium-sized melodies.
That restlessness pays off more often than not. “Blood Spiller” and “Careless Offering” revel in a kind of spiralling, doom-laced paranoia, like someone broadcasting bad news from the bottom of a quarry. What stops Heavy Pendulum from collapsing under its own weight is the way Cave In keeps threading light through the cracks. “Wavering Angel,” the twelve-minute closer, does an almost shameless Led Zeppelin cosplay at first, before turning into colourful farewell. Elsewhere, the band’s pop instincts remain disconcertingly sharp. It’s that friction that gives “Heavy Pendulum” its specific charge. The new line-up delivers this charge perfectly.
