It’s easy to understand why Caleb Scofield, bass player for hardcore hellions turned indie rock wunderkind Cave In, might be out to prove something with his new band, Zozobra.
Scofield makes no excuses for Antenna, Cave In’s major-label flop that had shoppers at Best Buy cratching their heads and long-time fans feigning regurgitation. But he doesn’t really defend it either.
“It’s not like we look back on Antenna and we’re like, ‘what were we thinking?’” he says. “But we definitely took a strange little path for a while and lost ourselves personally and musically.”
In 2001, after putting out three records, all hugely popular within the punk community, Cave In began to attract the attention of major labels. The next year saw the band sign with RCA and within another year, Antenna was on the streets. It was, by almost any standard, a dud. Gone was the metal aggression of the band’s first two albums, Beyond Hypothermia and Until Your Heart Stops. Absent as well was the prog-rock-inspired experimentation and noodling of 2001’s Jupiter. For Cave In fans, Antenna was the worst-case scenario: a toned-down, glossy college-rock record.
Thankfully, everyone involved saw that the new relationship between the band and the big time wasn’t working out. After escaping from the major-label world, Cave In aimed at recapturing its dignity by returning to its roots and Hydrahead Records, the label that released their first three albums. For Perfect Pitch Black, Cave In ditched the hyper-precise production and sanguine vocals of Antenna, returning, in part, to the gruff form they exhibited as teenaged Metallica fans.
“I can’t say it was an attempt at a return to form, but it was a beginning of what we hope to be a true return to our band,” says Scofield.
[The guitarists] are always telling me that the riffs seem bizarre. They call them “bass player riffs.”
Before that could happen, the band needed a break. Guitarist Stephen Brodsky started work on a solo record. Drummer J.R. Connors joined the skate-rock band Doomriders and started another rock outfit, called Pet Genius, with Brodsky. Guitarist Adam McGrath started a new band, a garage-inspired outfit called Clouds. That left Scofield free to work out some of his own ideas with drummer Santos Montanos, a bandmate of his from ambient doom rockers Old Man Gloom.
Zozobra, the resultant collaboration with Montanos, employs harmonic choruses that are balanced by an equal number of gutwrenching screams. Their album, Harmonic Tremors, combines the best of Cave In’s early and final days with the down-tuned, mid-tempo, post-hardcore artistry of Old Man Gloom. It’s a crushing mix of sampled beats and machine-like riffage, topped with vocals that swing from growls to purrs in a matter of measures.
“I wanted to hurry up and put them on some sort of recorded media before I didn’t care about them anymore,” Scofield says of the Zozobra tracks. “I’d been kind of throwing around the idea [of starting a band] for quite a while. It’s a goal I set for myself, just to see if I was capable.”
Scofield says without hesitation that he never wanted to be anything but a bass player. Unlike so many of his peers, he insists, he doesn’t secretly yearn for six-string glory. That may be the case, but Scofield can play the guitar. He’s good enough, it turns out, to write and record one of most interesting records of 2007.
“I play a fair amount of guitar,” says Scofield, who has recruited friends from his home town of Boston to play the guitar parts of his songs on tour. “As far as recording goes, it’s not any super [complicated] guitar—just big, heavy riffs. In a live setting, I don’t have any desire to play guitar.”
There’s no question Zozobra is the bastard child of Old Man Gloom and Cave In. It has the former’s sludgy, rhythmic brutality and the latter’s sound sense of melody.
Still, Scofield says, “I made an effort not to sound too much like either band.”
And to stay focused on the Zozobra disc, the brutishly voiced bassist booked studio time immediately after returning from the final Cave In tour.
“I had a date that I had to work for,” he says. “It was out of my hands at that point.”
The results of his fevered writing pace were interesting to say the least. For the rhythm section of a band as odd and heavy as Old Man Gloom to write such a guitar-heavy album baffled even the guitar players Scofield employed to play the songs live.
“They are always telling me that the riffs seem bizarre,” Scofield says. “They call them ‘bass player riffs.’ They normally wouldn’t write songs like that.”
For now, Scofield is content to tour the country with his friends, playing his own bizarrely concocted songs. But someday, he says, he’d like to see Cave In record one final album, a swan song to set the record straight.
“I think we owe it to ourselves and other people that like our band to do another record,” says Scofield.
He’d also like to see the Old Man Gloom project get a little more attention from its creators. Hugely popular within underground circles, the supergroup (featuring members of hardcore and metal giants Isis, Cave In, and Converge) has only ever played a handful of shows despite having recorded five albums.
“It’s kind of a disappointment that we were never able to tour a little more,” Scofield says of Old Man Gloom. “We’re all really proud of it and it deserves more attention.”
-Oakland L. Childers
Zozobra: www.myspace.com/zozobra505
Hydra Head Records: www.hydrahead.com