The Cave Singers – London Union Chapel

The Cave Singers are fronted by Pete Quirk, ex-singer of post-punkers Hint Hint, and also take in Pretty Girls Make Graves‘ Derek Fudesco and Cobra High’s Marty Lund. So it’s no surprise that their unplugged folk leanings are taken to maximum amplification, each note, each syllable, each chord reverberating to hearts a-quiver.

Their set at the beautiful, simply astonishing Union Chapel supporting Shearwater is dynamic, rustic, aching, essential and beautiful. Lyrically, the songs abstractly touch on religion and being, vocalised by Quirk’s hauntingly nasal tenor; religion is almost a gleeful recurring motif, and to see the sheer joy emitting from his eyes as he stands in the middle of the chapel recalling, it’s as if he’s playing narrator.

The live percussion ranges from quietly lurking to whip-cracking, the tambourine-fuelled fever of the faster songs having the effect of a desperate frenzy; ‘Seeds Of Night’ is a squawk-fronted exhibit of fine-tuned fragility, ‘Dancing On Our Graves’ altogether more cathartic. The mournfulness and subtlety is almost bespokely tailored to the Union Chapel, each fragment of sound reverberating in and out of the three-piece’s instruments.

The most striking thing about The Cave Singers is the contrasts; sparse and rhythmic, light and shade, even a paradox as simple as fast and slow. ‘Cold Eye’ is inviting, ‘New Monuments’ desolate. And this writer can’t particularly figure out how or why. All she knows is that this vintage existentialism has completely taken her aback.