On Cold Cave’s debut, Love Comes Close, the music works as
minimalist dance pop, but everything about the way it’s contextualized
is awful. Essentially, what they’re doing is grafting sour grapes onto
disco pep. Sonically, they capture the spirit of the endeavor, but the
album can’t rise above its own basic stupidity.
Though the opening track’s title, “Cebe and Me,” emptily references
a remote Romanian commune, I can’t explain how that operates as subject
matter, since the lyrics are buried in pulsating white noise that, say,
Goldfrapp would use as a segue or mood-establishing device, while Cold
Cave seems happy to use it as … well, nothing. It’s just
ambience.
The rest of Love Comes Close alternates between stuff as
inaccessible as “Cebe and Me” and sassy synth-pop. These latter songs
mostly affect a pretty bad Stephin Merritt impression. The title song,
essentially a morbid exaltation of love and death set to disco beats,
nicely distills the band’s lack of imagination. Where a real impresario
like Merritt would have used the songs’ aesthetic to say something both
arch and heartbreakingly true, Cold Cave dishes up the worst
clichés of bad poetry: “Silhouettes shy as rain rots the drain /
Every day’s decay debases the dream.”
If you look past its narcissism and vapidity, Love Comes
Close succeeds as goth kitsch. It has as much subtlety and nuance
as the doodles of cartoon hearts pierced by knives you’d find in the
school notebooks of any given self-obsessed teen.
This article appears in Dec 10-16, 2009.