The Cave Singers - Welcome Joy

The word may carry all sorts of unsavoury connotations, but a makeover isn’t always such a bad thing.  Once members of various underachieving Seattle post-punk acts, singer Pete Quirk, bassist Derek Fudesco and drummer Marty Lund are these days mining a much more productive seam of stripped-down Americana in their new guise.  An accomplished debut, Invitation Songs, was a promising start and Welcome Joy builds on these febrile beginnings to emerge as something of a low-key classic.  Several touchstones – most notably Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bruce Springsteen and Led Zeppelin’s folk excursions – are summoned up over the course of the album, but the overriding atmosphere of sparse intensity makes this much more than an exercise in skilfully purveyed nostalgia.

Opener Summer Light nails it immediately with a tapestry of picked acoustics and a bass drum heartbeat providing the perfect backdrop for the appealingly nasal Quirk to intone an instantly uplifting melody line. Nothing else quite matches that for instant kicks – although the knockabout cowboy-punk of In the Cut comes close. The others keep a polite distance before nestling into the psyche, with the the eastern-influenced Shrine, the shimmering Hen of The Woods and the haunting closer Bramble in particular offering flawless testimony for their creators’ change of tack.