Cold Cave LP abounds in contrast

Cold Cave

Cherish the Light… Cold Cave

Cherish the Light Years

Matador Records

Rocks like: Melodramatic goth-rock with an uptempo edge

Grade: B+

Exhilaratingly experimental is the best way to describe Cold Cave’s new album, Cherish the Light Years.

Compared to the band’s 2009 debut, Love Comes Close, Cherish the Light Years is much more self-assured, and the variety and range of the album merit praise.

Cold Cave began as the solo project of Wesley Eisold, a New York City-based artist. Currently, Eisold is the project’s singer and songwriter, as well as the band’s main director — although he also often works with a small core of other musicians.

The first track on Cherish the Light Years, “The Great Pan is Dead,” sounds like a statement, with its powerful guitar chords, radiant synths and emotional vocals. In fact, in a blurb on his band’s Tumblr, the singer wrote that the song is about “magic, preservation, youth and movement” — themes, he says, that encompass everything his music and career are about.

The song is, indeed, a blend of his previous and present sound, but it falls short of being a suitable artistic thesis for his music, which is characterized by change, variety and a sense of restlessness that is too fluid to epitomize. Nevertheless, its bursting energy underneath a layer of emotional terror — a sound that permeates all songs on the album — is so gripping that it leaves the listener breathless.

Throughout the LP, dark poetry underlies the intense score and provides a melodramatic undertone to Eisold’s goth-rock sensibilities. His voice often sounds more forced than raw in this album, however, which detracts from the pathos he attempts to achieve.

From beginning to end, the passion and variety of Cherish the Light Years renders the album hard to forget — and sometimes, hard to define.