Threace

Threace possesses a wholly immersive sense of itself, and a free floating kinetic energy that is out of step with most contemporary riff-based music. Its command of sonic hypnosis is all the more impressive considering its brevity.

By rising to the high standards of recording and tonal detail set by “kraut” rock pioneers the first time around, and contextualizing the movement’s obsession with repetition within novel structures and rhythms, CAVE’s music sits on a decades-long continuum with the forebears that continue to inspire its members to pick up their instruments and write new music.

Cave have spelunked somewhere beyond their already compelling intellectual fizz and pop onto something really special here, letting an evolving sound lead the way to some kind of diamond party-mine. [Aug-Sep 2013, p.88]

By no standards is the album a cleanly polished turn toward high-brow composition, but the sounds are more inspired and the hybrid of improvisation and clear-headed direction is one of their most cohesive-sounding, not losing any amount of excitement or fire with the added structure.

For the most part Threace careens joyfully through a series of angular, happy-to-be-alive polyrhythms that are primal in their appeal.

On Threace, the group’s second full-length for Drag City, Cave’s heart still beats to the motorik pulse, but they’ve broadened out their repertoire to include some of the other groovy, stoney sounds of the 70s.

Though their ongoing debt to the Krautrock canon remains evident, their stoner brew is now heavily spiced with influences drawn from Afrobeat, funk and space-rock. [Jan 2014, p.72]

The five tracks never end far from where they begin, but they're also forever shifting. [No. 103, p.53]

Threace is a hard-earned kind of exploration, the kind of experimentation made all the weirder for never really seeming weird. CAVE has been slowly but surely building themselves to this moment, its finest yet, and there’s no sign that movement will stop.