Artist: Cave In
Title: Jupiter
Release: August 8th, 2000
Label: Hydra Head Records
Listen here: Bandcamp
I have a confession to make. In the year 2000, I wasn’t listening to Cave In. Look, I know. I’m a poser and it pains me to admit that the progressive veterans of the Massachusetts hardcore scene were not on my radar at the time. However, I was eleven years old, likely far more concerned with killing time on my Playstation and watching Star Wars. So, ah, cut me some slack, okay?
In many ways, the cultural climate of the year 2000 can be seen as a crucial inflection point for the trajectory of alternative music over the next two decades. The world was in a liminal state of post-Y2K, pre-9/11 zeitgeist formation as the ‘90s gave way to the turn of the millennium and the seemingly boundless future of the ‘00s.
Boys bands were dying off and bling rap was steadily dominating the airwaves. Coming off the runaway commercial success of 1999’s Enema of the State, Blink-182 were pushing adolescent pop-punk to the masses. Woodstock '99, which featured notable performances from acts like DMX, Rage Against The Machine, Korn, and Metallica—alongside riots and fatal injuries—had scared the shit out of people, some even going out on a superlative limb to label it “the day the music died.” Meanwhile, groups like Linkin Park, Deftones and Limp Bizkit dropped massive, career-defining records that took nu-metal to stratospheric new heights.
To this messy cultural environment, enters Cave In and their then-controversial, now-classic sophomore LP, Jupiter.
On their 1998 Hydra Head debut, Until Your Heart Stops, Cave In were firmly lumped into the metalcore camp—that is, late ‘90s first/second wave metalcore, depending on where and how you do your pedant demarcation (think metalcore here as “heavy metallic hardcore” rather than “melodic death metal influenced, sing-scream chorus” stuff).
Produced by Converge mastermind and close friend Kurt Ballou, the album features some of Cave In’s most incendiary compositions, with tracks like “Moral Eclipse” and “Juggernaut” rippling with the manic staccato riffage of guitarists Stephen Brodsky and Adam McGrath, John-Robert Conners’ frenzied drumming, and coarse screams traded between Brodsky and bassist Caleb Scofield.
However, soon after Cave In finished that album’s touring cycle, it became clear that a shake-up was coming. While the seismic shift in sound and style present on Jupiter appears stark in comparison to their debut, several clues abounded as to where the band eventually wanted to end up.
In May of 1999, the band dropped the Creative Eclipses EP, a release that rapidly departed from their molten metalcore template and embraced a wide swath of instrumental inclinations: calm over chaos, psychedelic progressions, and a greater emphasis on clean signing and Brodsky’s eclectic dynamic range.
Working with producer Brian McTernan—whose impressive discography cut between hardcore mainstays like Bane, Converge and Drowningman, as well as emo icons like Piebald, Texas Is The Reason and The Promise Ring—Cave In sought to incorporate the spacey atmospherics and alt-rock tendencies of acts like Hum and Failure into their robust metal template (i.e. see the cover of Failure’s “Magnified” sequenced into the EP’s middle). This in turn, made McTernan the no-brainer choice for producer of their ambitious album follow-up.
Listening to Jupiter now is still a journey. The opening title track smacks you in the face with McTernan’s bright production, contrasting a charging lead riff from Brodsky with crisp, sizzling drums from Conners and Scofield’s rumbling, sticky low-end, the kind that made alt-rock riffs land right in your solar plexus, really feeling like metal.
Delivering the album’s first line of verse, Brodsky’s mid-range croon is a curious thing: twangy and inflected, unwieldy and uncanny, a little left-of-centre for standard rock, at once strangely familiar and familiarly strange:
“The metronome was wrong again/
My heart has surely gone and skipped a beat.
And once the rhythm is all right/
I can understand your point of view.”
Across Jupiter, Cave In cast the listener off onto the edge of their own mind, floating through journey’s both deeply inward and dazzlingly vast.
“In the Stream of Commerce” flirts with Middle Eastern guitar lines and a backing haze of warped delays and warbling synths. “Innuendo and Out the Other” wraps around Brodsky’s high falsetto, flitting over twinkling riffs and sludgy rhythmic shifts. Straight-forward rocker “Brain Candle” is Cave In doing their most overt Hum worship with suitably electric results, and the prog freak-out “Decay of the Delay” dips right into Pink Floyd territory.
And yet, talk to anyone about Jupiter or Cave In’s musical orbit in general, and chances are that conversation will eventually turn to “Big Riff.” And it’s easy to see why. It’s the easy album standout and one of the band’s most iconic compositions—for very good reason.
Firstly, it’s just a ballsy thing to call a rock song. Simple yet effective. But secondly, Cave In aren’t here to fuck around and they absolutely deliver on that promise. The track does indeed have riffs and they’re positively gargantuan, clashing with Brodsky’s occasional curdling scream like the cosmic ballet of errant space debris.
Commercially, Cave In went on to have plenty of ups and downs in their career, including major label fuckery, hiatuses, and even the tragic passing of Scofield in 2018. But they continued to push themselves creatively, both within the band and elsewhere, working on numerous side projects like Mutoid Man, Kid Kilowatt, Old Man Gloom, and Zozobra.
At a critical level, Jupiter divided many fans upon its release. The band’s stylistic pivot was untenable for some hardliners, while others took time to grow and evolve with their band on their own musical journey.
Hindsight is a powerful thing, and it goes a long way to explaining how Lambgoat called Jupiter “innovative” in 2000, while Pitchfork denigrated the album as “arty metal.” Only a few short years later, Decibel would place it at #2 in their list of Top 100 Greatest Metal Albums Of The Decade, second only to Converge’s indomitable Jane Doe (2001), while Brooklyn Vegan wrote about how Jupiter helped influence the post-hardcore boom of the 2000s.
In that sense then, whether or not I was aware of Jupiter in the year 2000 is of little consequence. I enjoy it now, knowing full well the import it had on shaping alternative music across the vast expanse of space and time.