To say Cherish The Light Years is an album that was years in the making is an understatement. It is an album that has taken the lifetime of Wesley Eisold to realize, the culmination of numerous bands and projects and collaborators and ideas and hours and hours and hours. It is the sum total of an immeasurable distance travelled. Light years, I’m sure it felt like.
It is the result of a career well-spent — Cherish The Light Years being a title that one can only hope applies to metaphorical creative distance that Eisold has trotted to achieve this statement of an album. This record, the second under the Cold Cave banner, never feels like a toil or struggle. It seems to flow effortlessly from Eisold (which I’m pretty sure is far from how it actually flows — this shit is probably much more difficult than it seems), never more apparent than on lead track/single “The Great Pan Is Dead.”
“The Great Pan Is Dead” comes out of the closet with rifles ablaze, packing as much sound and desperate emotion that one can pack into four minutes. There is a synth lead that is a worthy successor to “Life Magazine,” Cold Cave’s most well-known song, but it is in the dynamic vocals that the song becomes a new pinnacle. As a listener, you can’t help but want to stand up and thrust your body to every statement, shouting “yeah!” when Eisold exclaims “yeah! I will come running, gunning through the years.”
Nothing else on Cherish The Light Years comes close to this song, resulting in a disappointed, unsettled feeling on early listens. No one likes a red herring of a single, but to cast Cold Cave in this light is almost unfair. Sure, “The Great Pan Is Dead” is the album’s best song. It is probably going to wind up as a classic song. But, that doesn’t mean that the remaining tracks are poor, they just pale in comparison.
“Villains On The Moon,” the record’s second single, continues the album’s prevalent theme of moving through the past and into the future and connects with an anthemic chorus. The unfortunate thing, that plagues the majority of the album, is that though Eisold is clearly improving as a musician, as a lyricist, and as an overall artist, his culmination is still grounded in sounds that retread material of Joy Division and New Order and Bauhaus and whatever other dark, 80s music you can think of. The album’s production is remarkably clean, especially in comparison to Love Comes Close, and it doesn’t always do the songs a service. “Pacing Around The Church” disguises the strong keyboard leads with the beating bass and constant guitar fuzz. “Alchemy And You” throws in trumpets that sound out of place in the album’s relative shadows.
These songs, among others, lose what has always made Cold Cave most charming — the lo-fi trashiness. On their debut full-length, Love Comes Close, Cold Cave sounded like it could have come from a tiny bedroom, but the new Cold Cave is arena-ready, which isn’t necessarily where they belong. Sure, I would love to listen to “The Great Pan Is Dead” with a few thousand strangers, or dance to the epic “Icons Of Summer” with a multitude of anonymous sweaty hipsters, but for the most part, Cold Cave seem to reach too far on Cherish The Light Years. Sure, it is a bold leap from previous work, and something that should, if nothing else, be admired. But, the end sensation is one of anticipation, to hear where Eisold goes from here, now that he has made the album he has worked his career for and it is ultimately underwhelming. Thus Cold Cave are stuck with another good album, and are hopefully an album away from a great one.
