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“Terminal Deity” showed that the band’s metal influence wasn’t relegated to guitar theatrics, as Conners stepped up and showed a mastery of double bass runs that made the band’s breakdown parts leap out of the speakers. In a hair under 11 minutes, the band constructed one of the most densely powerful suites in all of hardcore. The two tracks that followed, “Terminal Deity” and “Juggernaut,” were further proof of Cave In’s creative genius. Most importantly, it showed Brodsky’s strength as a frontperson and vocalist-though Bannon’s inhuman shrieks certainly helped set a disquieting mood, too.
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Where metalcore guitarists of the past had known a Metallica riff or two, Brodsky and McGrath sounded like they’d spent their adolescence studying the solo to Van Halen’s “Eruption.” Those opening guitar heroics bore more than a passing resemblance to Slayer, but when flanked by the band’s pummeling hardcore attack, it showed they were injecting something new into this mixture of genres. Until then, metalcore had largely been made up of hardcore musicians stretching their limited skills as far as they could go, but here, the pair dashed off harmonized fretboard runs without batting an eye. “Moral Eclipse” opened the album with a bit of showmanship from Brodsky and McGrath. Until Your Heart Stops was the product of collective will, less a singular statement from a band and more a declaration from a budding scene. But the album quickly became a family affair, as Converge vocalist Jacob Bannon contributed vocals, as well as their former bassist, Shettel, and featured a complementary soundscape designed by Agoraphobic Nosebleed’s Jay Randall. It made sense that Ballou would contribute to Until Your Heart Stops, especially given that it was one of the first projects he’d take on at his newly minted studio.
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When Cave In entered GodCity that April, Brodsky had been playing bass in Converge for over a year, as well as with Ballou in the side-project Kid Kilowatt. But even as they finalized their lineup at the zero hour, they’d be joined in the studio by some of their closest friends and collaborators. Instead of delaying the session or scrambling to find a singer, Brodsky opted to take up the position, whittling Cave In down to a four-piece. But just two weeks before Cave In was set to record, their vocalist abruptly quit. They’d been using fill-in bass players for a while (one of which was Piebald’s Travis Shettel), until Caleb Scofield, fresh off the break-up of his band Strike 3, agreed to play bass. With time booked at GodCity-the upstart studio run by Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou-the band was prepped for the session, even if they were still accounting for their gaps in personnel. By 1998, the band appeared to be settling into a groove, finally stable enough to enter a studio and record their debut album. Guitarists Stephen Brodsky and Adam McGrath, along with drummer John-Robert Conners, would be Cave In’s backbone in that gestational period, guiding the band with a set of influences that pulled from metalcore’s early canon without ever being beholden to it. Their splits and EPs showed a young band attempting to find their place in the genre while still struggling to solidify their lineup. And while no two sounded exactly alike, they’d all help establish what would come next.įormed the year those albums were released, Cave In’s early works were not particularly exceptional. By 1995, metalcore would see some of its most foundational texts laid down, such as Integrity’s Humanity is the Devil, Earth Crisis’ Destroy the Machines, Acme’s …To Reduce the Choir to One Soloist, and the post-Rorschach band Deadguy’s Fixation on a Coworker. Whether it was Rorschach’s noise-soaked passages that fell somewhere between bands on Amphetamine Reptile and Ebullition, Earth Crisis’ extension of Judge’s mid-tempo militarism, or the Charles Manson-worshipping of Integrity that gifted the genre with nihilistic occultism, bands were rarely aligned musically, much less ideologically. The genre would become a buzzword, but it was still nebulous enough to rope in bands who, looking back on it now, had little overlap. Meanwhile, on the East Coast, bands were creating their own hybrid of metal and hardcore, making a darker, mid-paced sound typified by the Cro-Mags and Carnivore.īy the early 90s, these approaches would begin to merge, getting saddled with the term “metalcore” in the process. In the late 80s, the once warring tribes of hardcore and metal began to crossbreed, the result of which was crossover thrash, a faster, more technical subgenre that was gaining prominence up and down the West Coast, with bands like Suicidal Tendencies and Cryptic Slaughter helping bridge that gap. Fittingly, the band’s journey of self-discovery was running parallel to hardcore’s own identity crisis. Formed in Massachusetts in the early 90s, Cave In took a few years to find themselves.