As children we are taught to colour inside the lines. The black borders of empty illustrations are meant to contain the rainbow of our young imaginations and we obey them because we don’t want to get into trouble. It’s only later that you gain a greater understanding of this practice: to learn to colour inside the lines is to learn to conform.
Cave Girl do not colour inside the lines. On their EP Who’s Tired?, the music of the Vancouver trio sprawls in tangled, caustic knots wherever it wants. These five “deeply marinated songs,” as the band describes, fall somewhere between pop and garage-rock and punk but genre lines have been erased. The band groans under the weight of their own emotions as they use lots of thick bass notes, jagged power chords, and distorted squeals. On “Noodles (again)” – a particularly tasty track – the repetition of two lines creates the clearest, and most moving, point of the recording: “I don’t want to see you anymore. I just can’t hurt you anymore.”
The title track, another highlight, begins with soft guitar picking in a lulling tempo until another guitar’s piercing whine grows louder. To reciprocate, the band moves with haste and a touch of anger, like fervent scribbles across a piece of paper. When you take a step back and take in this creation, and the EP as a whole, the end result is much more exciting than anything the lines could have held.
