Interview with Cavernous at 226 Recordings
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17 November 2010
Cavernous will always hold a special place in our hearts. They were the first band to do a full album here at 226 Recordings. They started tracking about a day after we finished getting everything built-out and set up. The result is Certain Angles, released March 27th, 2010. Not only are these guys generally hilarious, they are also pretty darn good at making music too. The members are: Harrison Jacob (guitar), Mikey Malet (guitar), Brandon Black (bass), and Marshall Black (drums). Cavernous is the type of band that no one ever describes as “meh.” They have a complex and dynamic sound coupled with some serious melodies and rhythms. I recently sat down with Harrison and here is what he had to say:
How did you guys meet?
I knew Marshall, who kind of started the whole thing. Our old high school bands used to play together. One day he hit me up about wanting to start a band, and I was stoked because Marshall is an awesome drummer. When I went to his house, I met Mikey. The three of us jammed that day, then Brandon joined. He and Marshall are cousins, so they had played together before.
How’d you guys come up with the name Cavernous?
I hate band names. I hate thinking about them. I hate choosing them. It doesn’t really matter in the end because the music makes the band name. Like Slayer, if Slayer weren’t the most awesome thrash band, everyone would think that was the lamest name. But since they’re awesome, their name is awesome by association. Cavernous is something that sort of gives you an image or a vibe, but doesn’t hit you over the head with it. We took an adjective that isn’t used very often that loosely relates to the band and sounds cool. People always spell it wrong though. We’ve been called Carnivorous, Caverness, and even Carnivosis once in El Paso.
Your name conjures up images. Is that something you try to do with your music too?
Kind of. It’s not conscious; we kind of have to rely on it though. When you have a vocalist with lyrics, it’s a lot easier to put across an idea or an image or feeling since people can relate to words pretty easily. When you’re in an instrumental band, you have to craft a song in such a way that has the same effect without the aide of words. We’re not going out of our way to create that effect, or tell a story, it just happens. It’s always very off the cuff. Mikey usually comes up with a riff and we go from there without having any preconceived ideas. If we do have a set idea, it’s very general, like we want to write a long song.
How would you describe your sound? Are you heavy?
Yeah, sometimes. A lot of people want to put us in that group. Sometimes when it comes to metal or hard rock, if you have any of it, you are that. Even if all your songs are soft and you have one heavy part, people are going to want to define you by that one heavy part. People just want to group things like that. We do have a lot of heavier, harder parts. To me, that’s just a different expression of emotion, the heavier side of things. Not necessarily anger, just heightened emotions. We are still melodic, that’s what ties it together. The melodies in metal are what got me into the genre in the first place. I just can’t get away from melody. Even if I’m trying to create the most brutal death metal song, there’s always going to be something catchy in it, I just can’t help it.
Do you think you would you be described differently if you had a singer? Like what if you had a girl singer, would that change people’s classification of you?
That’s a good point. We don’t know what a singer would sound like over us. We tried out a couple of guys who just screamed and, nothing against that, I listen to plenty of bands that sound like that, for us though, it’s just not enough. It wouldn’t do our music justice. A singer would totally change our sound. Singers change everything. There are so many bands that the singer makes or breaks. It’s weird because we don’t have to worry about that at all. Although, sometimes the lack of a singer makes or breaks you too because people are impatient and don’t want to listen to music unless there is a singer. Although, people like that probably wouldn’t like us anyway. If we had a singer like Chris Cornell from Audioslave, it would definitely tip the scales into just being rock or hard rock. If we had a singer with some sort of yelling/shouting/screaming type of style, that would definitely tip us into the heavy metal side. We are kind of balancing right now and not having a singer makes us a little more nebulous.
How do you feel about the term math metal? I’ve heard you described that way.
Some people would describe us as math metal. Some people consider anything not played in 4/4 math metal. Everyone has different standards. I think that math metal is kind of technical for technical’s sake, whereas we just play what is natural for us. We don’t want to play straight 4/4 all the time. Different time signatures are more fun and colorful. You can get more effects out of your songs and it gives you more freedom. There’s all kinds of weird whacky stuff going on behind the scenes in terms of time changes. Marshall does a really good job of keeping us all together so it sounds natural. To me, if you’re going to use some sort of technicality in your music, like an odd time signature, it shouldn’t be obvious. You don’t want to be like, oh listen to that 13/8, it’s so cool! Any sort of technical stuff you do shouldn’t jump out at you. It should always serve the song, not your ego.
Why did you name the songs of your first album in Roman numerals, and then give song titles to Certain Angles?
We felt for the first album, if we came up with song titles, they’d be 100% arbitrary. We were worried it’d be too much of a novelty or gimmick to repeat that with our second album. Like I said, we don’t really go into these songs attempting to tell a story or going out of our way to paint a specific picture. For this album, we listened to the songs and named them after whatever they reminded us of, or just named them after inside jokes. One song we used to call “Latin” as our working title because the drumming reminded us of a Latin rhythm. So in my ultimate nerdiness, I decided to name the song protolanguage as a nod to Latin being an old language. Others were just named after how the songs made us feel. The first album was names with roman numerals mostly out of laziness. We forced ourselves to make song titles this time.
What is your favorite Cavernous song?
Abyssal Plains. I think it’s the most cohesive song we have. From start to finish, it follows a theme, but it’s not boring or repetitive. It’s the perfect example of what we’re trying to do in terms of creating a soundscape. Some of our songs can be a little all over the place, which I like, but it can be a drawback for the casual listener. What I like about Abyssal Plains is that it retains all the aspects of our music that we like and flows well from start to finish. It also has some cool riffs.
How has the reaction been to Certain Angles?
People seem to really like it. The people that liked the first album definitely like the second album more. The sound and the songwriting are just a total step up from the last one. I think it’s gotten us more attention, but it’s hard to gage these things. Everyone at our shows gives us awesome feedback, but that kind of data is hard to collect otherwise. It’s been positive though. We get the most compliments about Marshall and I think it’s well deserved. He’s a monster. In relation to the amount of shows we’ve played, we’ve sold a lot of CDs. We’ve sold a lot of shirts too, since Jon’s artwork is so cool. In this day of digital downloads and mp3s, people would rather buy a shirt at a show than a CD. If I’m going to support a band, I’ll buy a shirt. You can wear a shirt, it’s practical. We’ve done well on our Bandcamp website where you can buy both physical and digital copies of the album. The more we play, the more we sell and the more hits we get on the website. Even if you have the coolest music in the world, you can’t just sit back and expect your music to sell itself.
You mentioned Jon. Is that who did your amazing album art?
Yes, Jon McCartney. He specializes in murals and large paintings. We gave him some general ideas that we thought sounded cool and might reference our music. One of the ideas was for it to be natural and organic, involving a human. We didn’t want it to have like a typewriter or something. We also wanted it to be surreal and kind of androgynous. Then we had the idea of hair coming around the front and a braid starting over the mouth. It’s kind of a reference to us not having lyrics. Besides that, it’s just cool imagery.
What are your plans for the future?
Right now we are just practicing and writing. We are planning to start playing more shows too.
Courtesy of 226 Recordings - Houston Recording Studio
