Cavity - "After Death", 2017

Prompted by a benefit show for a friend of the band, the reunion of Cavity (soon rebranded Cavity A.D., standing for "After Death") led the band to play a few live shows and to release a couple of records in very limited editions. The first, "After Death", was released in 2017 in 400 vinyl copies, with a repress of 500 copies in 2018 for the European market (featuring different cover artwork); it was also made available as a digital download. By listening to the album, consisting of just 4 long tracks, clocking in at around 38 minutes, it's easy to see why the band decided to release it as a limited edition for die-hard fans exclusively: it's probably the most anti-commercial record they could put out.

Revolving around a lineup featuring long-time members Gorostiaga and Barge, plus Ed Matus (who played briefly with the band in 1996), the album is characterized by doomy dirges that sound more akin to drone/ambient music than the southern-tinged sludge-core the band was known for in the 90s and early 00s. The most puzzling aspect is the complete absence of a proper drummer, which has been replaced by minimalistic, ritualistic percussions that consist exclusively of simplistic tom patterns and the occasional tambourine to keep time. It's akin to a jam session where you only got access to a couple of pieces of a drum kit, without the snare or the cymbals, so you only keep the time with whatever's left, while the rest of the band tries out a new riff for minutes on end. Rene Barge's vocals are in a similar register to 2001's "On the Lam", blending distorted screams with more decipherable vocals, especially on the last track, "Collision", a 14-minute, folkish tune in between an Indian dance and the less impactful works of Dylan Carlson's Earth; reciting his tortured poems over repetitive, hypnotic sequences of riffs that - more often than not - stay the same from the beginning to the end of a song, the singer's approach throughout the record is along the lines of what can often be heard in industrial music. 

"Scalpel A.D." is a remake of a song from the first 1993 demo, and the comparison with the old version tells you whatever you need to know about this record: if you take the drums out of a sludge/doom song, it's going to sound like this, and it doesn't really work. Maybe, if the band went for a SunnO))) approach, cranking every amp to 10 and annihilating the listener with layers of distortion and bass frequencies, it might have made some sense, but the guitars here are kind of subdued in the mix on the heavier tracks on side A, while they're completely missing on the ambient experiment "Fangs on Beyond", and they're played just through the clean channel on the album's closer.

"After Death" leaves one in doubt as to what point the band was trying to make, as it seems that all the creativity and energy of its older releases have disappeared. The addition of “A.D.” to the moniker may have suggested a different musical direction; however, the band came late to the drone music party and did not quite fit into the industrial-ambient or ritualistic music scene, not offering sophisticated enough material to compete in that league. It pains me to write in these terms about one of my favorite sludge metal bands of all time, and I wouldn't have done so had I not decided to review all of Cavity's full-length albums, but it is what it is.