Review: Caw! Caw! – Bummer Palace
Caw! Caw! - Bummer Palace (2010) [Fanatic] // Grade: B-
Two Chicago-based bands working under very similar names—Cacaw and Caw! Caw!—has been a confusing annoyance point with me for some time. Luckily, the two acts sound nothing alike, the former masters of slimy, heavy noise rock and the latter, as evidenced through their debut full-length, Bummer Palace, spreading a sound of wide-ranging, rainbow-tinted pop-punk.
Caw! Caw! could nearly be classified as a strictly live band, playing around the city from informal house shows to proper venues for nearly a decade, but until now only having a single formal EP to their recorded credit. For a band known for their unbridled energy, and love for the interactivity of the live space, cramming that spirit into album format is a daunting task.
The band take on the challenge with the straightforward vision of “let’s just be ourselves”. “Toothless” kicks of Bummer Palace as a rightful introduction for new ears of the vast amount of explorations you’ll get on any one Caw! Caw! track. Clanging percussion pushes off-kilter punk falsetto interspersed with expanses of psychedelic guitar jam outs. “Vacuole” puts the band’s punk roots at the forefront, a frenzy of delightfully sloppy vocals and rushing guitar.
Caw! Caw! seem blind to terms like “cohesion” and “structure”, but this naivete comes off as charming. If their goal was to create an album that is representative of their live experience, then Bummer Palace is a total success. The vocals across the album are a zip line of stylistic shifts, issuing a bedside serenade in “Basement Apparitions”, touting hook-heavy, snot-nosed indifference in “Conjunctivitis” and howling in time with the riffs of “My Starship”. The instrumentation is equally unpredictable. Cascading avalanches of guitar give way to singsong head-bopping only to end up in a wall of noise by any given track’s end. And through all the bipolar transitions, the band seem blissfully unaware, smiles plastered to their faces happy to be able to claim: “Hey, we’re not boring. Wanna hang out?”
Caw! Caw! are probably always going to be better experienced live. Screaming in your face in an intimate setting is where they belong. While Bummer Palace is unstructured, and generally spastic, its messy eccentricities feel right.
