Photo by Rachel Buth
Indie rock fundamentally changed the wiring of an entire generation of musicians. Over the years, the stylistic tics that once distinguished the genre—the idiosyncratic tunings, scrappy production, droll sensibilities and ironic detachment—have become so ingrained in the DNA of the average, 20-something musician that these traits no longer scan as quirky or unusual. They’ve become so expected, in fact, that it’s now almost more surprising when a young, big-city band skirts them entirely.
Case in point: Milwaukee’s Cavewives, whose debut album, Be The Dog, is an unabashed product of the Guitar Center tab shelf school of rock ’n’ roll, proudly indebted to The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Beach Boys and Pink Floyd. Of course, there are indie acts that take inspiration from those bedrocks, too, but unlike the most prominent bands in the East Side, Bay View and Riverwest music scenes, The Cavewives play their brand of bluesy, psychedelic rock ’n’ roll entirely straight. Their classicist approach might strike you, depending on your preferences, as either refreshingly earnest or deeply uncool.
Guitarist Kevin Topel is well aware of that divide. “Some people might interpret a passion for classic rock as living in the past, liking something that’s antiquated, arcane or outdated, as if you’re just some snobby audiophile who can’t appreciate new forms,” Topel says. “I think a lot of those criticisms stem from the indie camp, but as I see it, classic rock is a tradition. I feel like it was kind of in its germ state, until The Beatles were able to take that distinctly American music and give this long-neglected classical tradition that was latent in European music some new life. But in indie culture, I feel like there’s a suspicion of tradition, and maybe an outright dismissal of it, and along with that there’s an overemphasis on originality—the sense that you have to create totally out of yourself, that you have to really do something novel, and truly be an individual. I feel like a lot of great musicians in the indie scene might be cheating themselves out of a greater musical experience by not seeing how their genre and most other genres all had their genesis in this one overarching rock ’n’ roll tradition.”
If Topel speaks like a music major, he approaches songwriting like one, too. Though Be The Dog is a good deal heavier than anything The Beach Boys ever recorded, it shares Brian Wilson’s sense of compositional ambition, swooping through one intricate movement after another. Bluesy as they can sometimes seem on the surface, nobody would mistake The Cavewives for a simple bar band.
Topel contends that this kind of traditional, classic-rock can appeal to just about anybody, and he doesn’t have to look further than his own band for evidence. Singer Michael Marten is a relative newcomer to this style of rock. Before the group recruited him, he was listening largely to up-tempo indie-pop and mellow, contemporary singer-songwriters. His new bandmates filled him in on the classics. “I had never really been exposed to that kind of music, but they told me where to start,” Marten says. “It was almost like homework: Go home, listen to The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, all the things that I should have been listening to anyway. On my own I’d been writing music that was sad and sleepy, a pretty depressing style of music, so I was like, ‘This is great; I’ve been doing my own thing for too long.’”
Though Marten says the band doesn’t deliberately set out to recreate the classic-rock aesthetic, he admits the band doesn’t shy from it, either. “We’ve never been like, ‘Oh this sounds too much like Led Zeppelin; we don’t want to get compared to them,’” he says. “For me, doing that whole ’70s-esque sound with our own twist on it is just really fun, because that’s my favorite era of music.”
The Cavewives play a free show at Yield Bar on Friday, March 6 with Calliope and Cinco Boys at 9 p.m.
