As excited as I inevitably get every time a headline involving any member of Cave In rolls through my RSS reader, if I’m being honest I haven’t been able to get that into any of the many non-Cave In projects released by members of Cave In. Everyone seems to love Doomriders, and I certainly like ‘em just fine… but the truth is they seem to fall just a little short of what they could and should be in theory. Ditto for Zozobra, who are probably my favorite associated non-Cave In band.

This holds especially true for all of Stephen Brodsky’s many side projects, bands and solo releases. Just can’t feel ‘em. I’d all but stopped paying attention until a headline on Heavy Blog is Heavy about new Stephen Brodsky solo material caught my eye, and I let curiosity get the best of me. And you know what? I’m glad I did, because this is pretty solid stuff (posted after the jump, natch).

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Seminal Boston band Cave In have an intruiging history, one that took them from sweaty basement DYI hardcore shows to spaced-out progressive mettalirock to major-label bidding war and then all the way back, all within the span of a few short years. No heavy band from the Northeastern US seems to be as widely loved and respected yet criminally overlooked as Cave In.

Cave In started out playing a blistering, dense hybrid of hardcore and metal and morphed into progged-out, cerebral space-rock seemingly overnight. The band’s early sound filtered Metallica and Slayer riffs through aggro-calculus-core chugga-chugga akin to Converge and Dillinger Escape Plan, two bands whose histories are closely intertwined with Cave In. But what made the band so interesting was the way they grew over time to weave art-metal experimentation, melody and psychedelia into their otherwise brutal, mind-bending assault. The result was a truly progressive, artistic, brutal and most importantly one-of-a-kind sound that was unmatched during the band’s run and remains astonishing and relevant to this day.

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