Cold Cave 'Love Comes Close' (Matador) Released 02/11/09

In some ways, it’s a tiny miracle that Cold Cave exist in their current form. Counting among their number members of art-noise gang Prurient and Jamie Stewart’s gut-wrenching Xiu Xiu, their frontman and project originator Wesley Eisold was the former vocalist for none-harder none-faster hardcore mob American Nightmare. Hardly the group you’d expect to make pretty, sparse electro-pop of the kind you might find frequenting Manchester in the early eighties, but then Cold Cave’s debut album Love Comes Close is full of these charming contradictions.

A case in point: opener ‘Cebe and Me’ paints a desolate landscape, ushering in a blistering electronic drone punctuated by Kim Gordon-esque spoken word, before the title track suddenly bursts to life with delicately strummed guitar and a deliciously metronomic drum-beat worthy of Factory’s finest. All the melody held back in the album’s opening few minutes is suddenly scattered over its remainder, filling ‘Life Magazine’ with a simple but incredibly addictive rise-and-fall bleep theme and imbuing ‘Heaven Was Full’ with a slow, stately majesty.

Sonically, it’s impossible to ignore the elephant in the room here – the entire of Love Comes Close bears a striking resemblance to some strange amalgam of Factory Records’ entire roster. The sweet and sour melodic fireworks and mumbled baritone of ‘The Laurels of Erotomania’ are pure New Order, and the drama summoned throughout ‘Heaven Was Full’ evokes the ghost of Ian Curtis even as it sounds oddly contemporary. Yet herein lies the odd thing – there’s something about the earnest manner in which Cold Cave carry themselves, and the resolutely individual nature of each member’s previous musical endeavors, that set them apart from the endless hordes of Joy Division-apeing modern post-punkers.

It’s there in the assertion that Eisold and co are doing what they want regardless of commercial nous – the sudden burst of fried guitar during ‘The Trees Grew Emotions and Died’ and the relentless darkness of ‘Hello Rats’ are hardly indications of mainstream interest. It’s this aspect that makes it hard to dismiss Love Comes Close as mere copyism. Even if its riches are never surprising, they’re certainly deserving of more credit than that.