Looking Forward to Some "White Silence"

Most nights insomnia is the bane of my existence. I toss, I turn, I do a whole lot of not sleeping. Most night's I'll reach around in the dark for my laptop and make my eyes mad at me with it's blinding light, and make my brain mad at me for reading the same news posts I've already read the day before. BUT THIS MORNING I finally love my insomnia, because I happen to have stumbled upon Amazon.com's listing for Cave In's much anticipated White Silence!!!

As someone who spends far too much time editing music articles on Wikipedia, I've come to find tons of ways to discover information about upcoming albums (sans torrenting or other illegal activities) before their official announcement. Advance copies of albums are sent out to several places a few months in advance for various reasons, mostly for reviewing and what not. So when I popped my head into one of my usual places (which will not be named) last week, I noticed a catalog number for both a CD and LP version of White Silence. I was floored, because I knew this meant within two weeks there would be an official announcement and probably a full song for previewing, or some other promotional goodie, to whet the appetite of a starving fan like me.

Another great (on second thought, they've made some pretty laughable mistakes in the past) OKAY place for finding details about upcoming albums is Amazon. I wanted to see if Amazon simply had just a placeholder page for White Silence that might be further proof of it's imminent release. What I got, was a large image (not just a dinky thumbnail) of the cover art, full track listing, 30 second samples and a release date. FAR FAR FAR more than I was expecting. And after sifting through some internet chatter, I couldn't find anyone else that that mentioned this slice of gold. It made me really internet-happy -- a substantially less fulfilling variation of happiness, but it'll suffice at 5:30am on a Sunday when I should be out cold.

Cover art for White Silence according to Amazon. It's pretty out there

for something Cave In has released, but then again, has there really

been a unifying theme in their art?

And there's actually a lot to be said about this little find, even though it's just the bare essential details for any album. First, allow me pick apart the cover art. The bright yellows, reds, blues and purples strike me as oddly flashy for a Cave In album. Their other covers have been far more subtle and mild as far as color schemes go. They're colors I'd expect from a more contemporary hardcore band, while wearing a baseball hat with the bill turned upwards and an XXL basketball jersey. As far as content of the art goes, the little doodles between the images remind me a lot of the doodles on Planets of Old drawn by Aaron Turner (formerly of Isis), so perhaps he lent at least a helping hand in the packaging. The color-filtered images between the doodles appear to be the band and various pieces of audio equipment. The big purple part on the left looks like a photograph of trees, and the rest are too small to make out. The top section has a label which lists the track listing and gives the album title. This could just be the little thing Hydra Head Records attaches to all of their CDs, which has advertisements and stuff on the inside, and from a marketing stand point is a pretty cool idea. If it's actually part of the cover art, and not a HHR advertisement, then it really gives the cover a more old school rock album vibe. Back when people would flip through vinyl after vinyl, you'd want to have details like that at the top so it'd be the first thing you see.

I wouldn't consider myself art critic, but I have an eye for detail and I'm highly opinionated, so what else is there? As much as I picked at the art, it does feel like it could be an instant classic. It's got a lot going on and it seems pretty original. Something the collector wouldn't mind collecting.

Now for the track listing, the first thing that I notice is track 3 titled "Sing My Loves." Not so much because of the totally anti-hardcore title, but because it's 8:18 long. Cave In albums typically have one song that's longer than the rest, and here it is at track three. Most bands that attempt a longer song compose something with a lot of instrumentals and tack it on at the end, but some bands (The Smashing Pumpkins come to mind) bury their longer tracks mid-album. Sometimes this works, other times (Converge's momentum-killer "Grim Heart/Black Rose" comes to mind) a longer track can ruin an album. I'm hoping an eight-minute song at track three won't kill it. Also, most Cave In albums have a wide variety of track lengths. Other than "Sing My Loves," the rest of White Silence seems pretty uniform. This worries me slightly.

A live recording of "Summit Fever" from November 2009, which

will become track 6 on White Silence. I hear healthy portions of

both Jupiter and Until Your Heart Stops in this track.

Also worrying me in the track listing, are the three tracks I've already known for a long time now: "Vicious Circles," "Summit Fever" and "Centered." Talk about album holes, Christ. The first two were played at Cave In's reunion performance in July 2009, which was later released on the Planets of Old bonus DVD, and a live recording of "Centered" was leaked online in June 2010. I'm really hoping this album wasn't written and recorded at various places and various times. That was probably the sole downfall of Perfect Pitch Black -- it's a collection of ten songs from one recording session in 2003 and two different sessions in 2004. They're all great songs on their own, but it just wasn't a cohesive effort. It should have been released as two EPs or something. So with some of these tracks dating back to the Planets of Old sessions, I'm really hoping for a more unified album and not Perfect Pitch Black Part 2.

BUT these are all, of course, little petty complains based on very little information. I'd know more about what the tracks sound like, but the 30 second samples seem fucked up at the moment. After hearing their comeback EP and the three previously release tracks, I'm confident that this will be a really great album. An album of the year contender for sure. According to Amazon it'll be released on May 24, 2011. I've already got my calendar marked!