Flush It Friday: A Perfect Pitch Black Retrospective
As the waves will hang lower than low.
Earlier this week, Hate5six posted a new Cave In set from the Rich Hall Forever memorial show that took place in June. The band opened with “Off to Ruin” and “The World is in Your Way” from 2005’s Perfect Pitch Black, blasted into the past with classic Until Your Heart Stops opener “Moral Eclipse,” got spacey with Heavy Pendulum tracks “Careless Offering” and “Blinded by the Blaze,” and then closed, of course, with Jupiter‘s “Big Riff.” A tidy set—just 6 tracks!—but more or less precisely what you’d want or expect from Cave In in 2025. Even with the short dip into their long-gone ’90s metalcore past with “Moral Eclipse,” you’re struck by the cohesion of the band’s far-reaching sound across the decades.
And yet, opening with two tracks from Perfect Pitch Black isn’t what I expected to hear at all. I was shocked, even! With this little push, I spent the week with the album, turning it over and over for inspection. 20 years after its original release in September 2005, how does Perfect Pitch Black fit into the ever-twisting history of a band like Cave In? What was or still is memorable about it? Is it (still) good?
If you were to ask most Cave In fans what they remember most clearly about the album, the answer would be “Trepanning.” The most aggressive track the band had released in years, “Trepanning” sounds like a precursor to Red Fang or a Scissorfight song sent to space. Or, better yet, as a surprisingly astute if abysmally written Lambgoat review has it, stoner rock à la Queens of the Stone Age. This, I think, is the key to the album. As every review from 2005 will tell you, the band was still recovering from their time on RCA though many of the songs had been written during the same time period as Antenna. Looking back and thinking about the lingering success of 2002’s Songs for the Deaf, it starts to feel like Cave In might’ve been toying around with making a stoner rock album. “Droned,” in the year of our lord 2025, sounds like if you ran Antenna‘s “Penny Racer” through the desert on a dune buggy. Closer “Screaming in Your Sleep,” too, has that kind of rolling-bass bounce of the more radio-friendly stoner rock that felt ubiquitous in the mid-aughts. Killer instrumental track “Ataraxia” has some stoner traces, too. Is Perfect Pitch Black a stoner album? Not exactly. But I think it’s more of one than I ever thought.
When Heavy Pendulum came out in 2022, 4 years after the tragic death of bassist/vocalist Caleb Scofield, I almost felt like the band had been too influenced by the addition of Nate Newton (Converge, Old Man Gloom, Doomriders, Jesuit, etc., etc.) Listening back through Perfect Pitch Black this week, particularly in the context of the band’s Rich Hall Forever set that sets together the two albums, what I hear most of all is how much Perfect Pitch Black is a Scofield record. His unmistakable roar and dug-deep bass riffs are the album’s hallmark. The swinging, pounding rhythm of “Off to Ruin” is as much a psychedelic take on Doomriders than anything on Heavy Pendulum. It’s Scofield’s massive presence on Perfect Pitch Black that makes it such a distinct record on the heels of Antenna. “The World is in Your Way” and the sprawling “Paranormal,” weirder surely than anything from Antenna, are taken to loftier heights (if not dirgier lows) because of Scofield. The long association and affinity between Newton and Cave In made his fit in the band obvious, but now, I think it makes even more sense. In some ways, the band survived a scrape with a major label because of Caleb Scofield’s influence on the band’s sound.
To be sure, Perfect Pitch Black is a bit awkward at times. No one really needs the acoustic “Down the Drain,” which sounds not unlike an Incubus song. The album’s final two tracks, “Tension in the Ranks” and the aforementioned “Screaming in Your Sleep” are maybe two of my least favourite Cave In songs, even if the Coldplay-esque nature of “Tension in the Ranks” has a certain charm. It’s a tough way to end an album, to say the least. These kind of missteps would be ironed out 6 years later on the gargantuan and perhaps underrated White Silence. Absolutely, you can hear the blueprint for White Silence, with its swirling blend of aggro-stoner, trippy psychedelia, and soaring harmonies, in Perfect Pitch Black. The general consensus in 2005 was that Perfect Pitch Black floated between 3.5 and 4.0 flaming toilets. 4 seems high, though 3.5 almost feels too low given just how good some of the material is. I guess Pitchfork was right: 3.65 it is.
And so we Flush!
Get Sticky with it. Na na na na na na. Get Roldy with it.
A Spear-miere! The new Recorruptor is out today.
Toilet Radio 570 features Joe n Jordan cannon-balling into the riptides of late 80s US heavy metal. Some choice cuts!
4.5 big ones from Stevo for the new Ba’al. In the immortal words of Rasheed Wallace: Ba’al Don’t Lie.
365 with some Sock Shirt Stains. It’s gross, and we have Eenzy to blame.
Double Spear-miere! A new track from Imperishable that is as ugly as the state from whence they hail.
Let’s do the Time Warp again. Legendary Word Guesser and Gurt Guzzler stagedmadness shares his 2k24 Top Ten.
There it is, y’all. Have at it. The week that is and was. GBUs below. Smooches.
