Cave States
Album: The Great Divide
Label: Undertow Music Collective
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.cavestatesmusic.com

Cave States is a new music project/band featuring St. Louis-based Chris Grabau (Magnolia Summer) and Danny Kathriner (formerly of Wagon, now playing with Half Knots/Colonel Ford), who are joined by Todd Schnitzer and John Higgins, with additional contributions from John Horton (also from Magnolia Summer, but here playing bass). The collection of songs Chris and Danny produced on meeting up last year proves a complementary quality to their individual work that makes their artistic collaboration quite inevitable. Being recorded live, and with minimal overdubs, proves exactly the right milieu for these songs to blossom, and subtlety of production (low-key, not lo-fi) is a telling feature. Of course, this is helped enormously by the understated quality of the playing, with sensitive brushes of colour from pedal steel, dobro and mandocello that enhance the moods and boost the precise, delicate guitar picking.

The songs themselves deal confidentially with the familiar themes of love, loss, hope, alienation, doubt and devotion, but there’s an elusive, almost indefinable extra level to the writing that lifts the music above merely attractive. The ongoing lyricism of the instrumental support on songs like Familiar Ways and Willa also provides a bonus for the listener, well demonstrating that technique doesn’t need to triumph over content. And despite the closely focused nature of the playing, there’s also an appealing looseness about the sessions as a whole. Maybe the repetitive makeweight instrumental track Over The Threshold should’ve been cut out, but it’s a pleasant enough tickover in its place I guess.

Altogether, a charming collection.

David Kidman