Cave Singers on tour to promote fourth album 'Naomi'

Cave Singers
Cave Singers

Cave Singers with special guest Bleeding Rainbow will perform tonight at Emerald Lounge in Asheville, N.C.

Photo provided
Published: Tuesday, April 9, 2013 at 1:00 p.m.
Last Modified: Tuesday, April 9, 2013 at 1:49 p.m.

Since the Cave Singers came on the scene in 2007, the group has been frequently labeled as folk.


Want to go?

Who: Cave Singers with special guest Bleeding Rainbow
When: 9 Thursday night April 11
Where: Emerald Lounge, Lexington Ave., Asheville, N.C.
Tickets: $10
Info: or 828-232-4372

Singer/guitarist Pete Quirk has nothing against folk, but he was caught off guard by the way the Cave Singers were perceived.

“I was like ‘Folk? Really?'” Quirk recalled in a late-March phone interview. “I think I was like that's pretty cool.

It's like I was just thinking that it just sounded so different from anything I had ever done before, but I never really thought we were playing folk music.”

Indeed there was nothing vaguely folk about the music Quirk and his bandmates had played before forming the Cave Singers.

Quirk was in the Seattle-based punk band Hint Hint. Guitarist Derek Fudesco was a member of Pretty Girls Make Graves, a band that had an angular and edgy pop/rock sound, and before that, the garage punk group Murder City Devils. Drummer Marty Lund was in Cobra High, a band that blended keyboard-laced mathy progressive rock and post-punk.

The Cave Singers newly released fourth album, “Naomi,” should cause those who see the group as folk to re-think that notion.

Don't look for much in the way of acoustic guitars or rustic textures. Instead, the sound is almost all electric frequently spare and decidedly rock, evoking a lighter, more mathy take on the Afro-centric polyrhythmic music of the Talking Heads circa “Fear Of Music” (or Television with more concise, less proggy songs). For instance, on “Canopy” and “Shine,” intricate bass and guitar patterns interweave to create a hypnotic, but intriguing backing for Quirk's vocals. A similar instrumental approach is used on “No Tomorrows,” only to more subtle effect, as the song has a gentler touch. “It's A Crime” takes things in a poppier direction behind its nifty lead guitar line, while “Evergreen” and “Week To Week” give the album a couple of pretty ballads featuring lead guitar and vocal. “Early Moon” and “When the World” close the album on more of a rocking-pop note.

“Naomi” represents a significant evolution for the Cave Singers, first of all, with the arrival of a fourth band member, bassist Morgan Henderson. This allowed Fudesco to step away from playing bass and let the band take greater advantage of that instrument.

“We added electric bass, which Morgan plays pretty melodically with really cool runs and lines,” Quirk said. “Now there's a foundation of bass and drums, so Derek doesn't have to be so rooted in creating sort of bass stuff. He can kind of, I don't want to say blossom, but I'm going to say blossom.

“There's more stuff going on,” he said. “It's just like the garden's growing, getting larger or something like that.”

The addition of Henderson also has brought a different dimension to the group's live sound.

“Before we had sort of a bass tone that Derek would play with his feet, like sort of on these organ pedal things, which was awesome (in itself),” Quirk said. “ Now, yeah, it (Henderson's bass) fills it up more. I think Morgan is really good at, like he just puts stuff where stuff needs to be instinctively, without overdoing it, because he still likes the idea of space as much as we do.”

“Naomi” also takes the Cave Singers to a new – and more positive -- place lyrically. In particular, the group's third album, “No Witch,” found Quirk in a dark period of self-examination.

“I found that for ‘Naomi,' when that came about, like that had turned the tide and I had sort of a long-term relationship that had ended,” he said. “And because that had ended, there was like lots of stuff that I needed to look inside about, to be like what's going on here? And what does it mean to be alone? What is loneliness? And what is aloneness, and even if I'm alone, am I not really alone because I'm surrounded by this world? And is that enough to be happy?

So those were the kinds of things I was thinking about (on “Naomi”).

Basically, I see ‘No Witch' as being in the darkness, being in the woods, no exit and kind of reveling in that in some way and ‘Naomi' kind of being like the first path opening up to exit out of there and sort of having a conversation with myself or something bigger than me about that.”

Quirk said the combination of him starting to feel better about himself as a person and moving on to a new phase in his personal life, as well as the time in which “Naomi's” songs took shape, also give the album a bit brighter personality.

“We wrote this record in the spring, the majority of it from like January (2012) on, as it was becoming spring, which in Seattle is like a miraculous thing because you kind of forget that it will stop raining,” Quirk said. “I think that was in our hearts, too, and so that's represented with the music. I think pastoral could be a great word (to describe the album), but also electrified pastoral.”


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