I shudder to think what Caltrop would’ve been able to do with a third full-length. It’s been 10 years (and about a month) since the Chapel Hill, North Carolina, four-piece released their sophomore LP, Ten Million Years and Eight Minutes (review here), and it continues to amaze me just how vivid of a mental impression it makes. Sometimes when a song gets stuck in your head, it’s like a vague impression or you only hear one piece. With this record, the tone and the production stay with you, so you don’t just hear a riff or a melody in your head, you hear it as it actually sounds. The shared vocals of guitarist Sam Taylor and bassist Murat Dirlik continue to be a defining feature, as well as the dizzying chemistry between them, guitarist Adam Nolton and drummer John Crouch. I never got to see this band live. I very much wish I had.

Ten Million Years and Eight Minutes was produced by Nick Peterson, and oh my it does jam. Consider “Light Does Not Get Old,” which picks up in pastoral-but-progressive fashion from “Ancient” immediately preceding and the opener “Birdsong.” The one-two at the outset is a boon to the listening experience on the whole, and I can’t sit here and take away from the memorability of those two tracks, and “Light Does Not Get Hold” both intends to and does switch up the vibe, but the album isn’t so much ‘front-loaded’ as ‘loaded,’ with the likes of the fuzz-noisy “Shadows and Substance” — some good old Southern-style West Coast noise rock — and the 13-minute focal point “Perihelion,” “Form and Abandon” returning to ground somewhat before falling apart and leaving quiet sparse guitar at the end, “Blessed” foreshadowing a subsequent decade of heavy psychedelic blues rock, or “Zelma” wrapping up with a humming drone running underneath wistful post-rock instrumentalism as though something just had to dirty it up.

Or maybe dirtying it is the wrong idea, but at very least something to make it grounded, because as progressive as Caltrop get in these eight tracks and 53 minutes — the vinyl is three sides on a 2LP — they never lose their organic feel. Some of that is the vocals of Dirlik and Taylor. You can hear voices push themselves and crack throughout, and it makes “Ancient” all the more of a standout. It happens later in “Light Does Not Get Old” as well, as the precursor to a fuzzed-out freaked-up psychedelic lead because fucking obviously. Caltrop aren’t the only band ever to smash different parts together and make it work, but there are moments on this record that sound like they were just trying to have fun playing opposites. I interviewed Taylor at the time and he talked about the differing songwriters and how everyone had a hand in putting the album together. I had asked how soon after their 2008 debut, World Class, they started writing new songs:

We wrote way back, in the last couple years, “Ancient,” “Light Does Not Get Old,” we wrote “Perihelion” and we wrote ”Blessed.” Those were really three pieces of material that we’d written and recorded as early as 2010. We recorded some of those three songs, a very rough version of them, and we were listening to those recordings, we just got together with Nick Peterson, who did the record, and we just set up and did two days – didn’t even try all that super hard to get the takes right – and we listened through those as a rough version of what we were going to do to record, and then we came back and re-recorded all of them at that warehouse in a serious recording session, and got them all done and mixed. We decided it was a 12-minute thing, a 13-minute thing and an eight-minute thing. Although it was great, we decided it needed more material to offset the longer, dense stuff.

We decided to write four things that we each brought. We normally are real egalitarian and all operate within the writing process. This time, we put these four things, and everybody brought something. Everybody brought an idea and we turned that into a song. We tried to limit them to five minutes. We wrote four five-minute things to offset the more dense, longer material that we’d already written, and we recorded those in a separate [session]. We wrote those within probably eight months and recorded them in a separate session. To answer your question, this has been kind of ready to go, because we ended up not getting Holidays for Quince to agree to do it until… We wanted it out last summer or fall, honestly. Then they wanted to have a finished product for a few months, so it ended up getting basically put off until this spring, because there’s no point in putting a record out in January. That’s what happened there.

It’s almost quaint now to think of an album only being delayed by a couple months, but that aside, it’s the structure of the thing I want to point out and the idea that, okay, they needed more songs so everybody got to put together a piece. That’s “Birdsong,” “Shadow and Substance,” “Form and Abandon” and “Zelma.” And it works. You would think it should sound disjointed? Well it does. And guess what? It doesn’t fucking matter. Ten Million Years and Eight Minutes, 10 years later, still bounces from one idea to the next, one song to the next, in a way that feels completely free and completely its own.

I guess in the end that’s what I’m trying to hone in on here. It’s not that Caltrop didn’t give a shit. Far from it. You don’t write songs this complex if you don’t care. But they took a live, spontaneous approach to their recording, they let themselves show a little personality, they broke a few of the “rules” of what making a heavy record should be, and though I never. got. to. see. them. live., having Ten Million Years and Eight Minutes as a document of what made them such a special band to start with isn’t to be undervalued.

These guys were friggin’ great in the right way at the wrong time. A summer album. I wish they’d done another record and I wish they’d gotten their due on this one.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

—

So the site passed 15,000 posts this morning. The Sasquatch review was number 15,000 published. I guess that’s not nothing. I’m not sure what it is. Thanks though, you know, for reading.

Negative headspace this week despite spending pretty much the whole thing writing about good music. Food issues. Nervous about the prospect of flying to Germany and being away for longer than I have been in about three years. Nervous that I’m continuing to fuck up as a parent, as a husband. All of it, really. This too.

Also tired of being sick. Still with the head cold, allergies, whatever it is post-covid. I’m glad to say that while the whole house has been sick, everyone seems to be on the mend. The Patient Mrs. is currently dying The Pecan’s hair purple for wacky hair day at preschool. Gonna have some eggs in a bit. So could be worse, certainly. Yesterday was rough. Today we’ll see.

The good news is my mother is coming for dinner, and it’s been about four weeks since that happened since her house had an outbreak right around the same time we did here, the two thankfully unrelated. But everybody’s well enough now that interaction can happen, so that’ll be good. And tomorrow we head north to CT to see The Patient Mrs.’ mother and sister as well. Leaving the house, changing things up. Good things.

Couple premieres next week, some cool stuff. I’m gonna stream the Foot record on Wednesday. In my head though I’m already starting to get ready for Freak Valley. I’ve never been before, so that should be an interesting experience. Been a long time since I was outside my comfort zone like that. I hope I remember how much I love it.

Great and safe weekend. Watch your head, wear your mask, don’t forget to hydrate. Thanks again for reading.

FRM.

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Tags: Caltrop, Caltrop Ten Million Years and Eight Minutes, Chapel Hill, Holidays for Quince, North Carolina, Ten Million Years and Eight Minutes

This entry was posted on Friday, June 3rd, 2022 at 11:11 am and is filed under Bootleg Theater. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.