By no standards is the album a cleanly polished turn toward high-brow composition, but the sounds are more inspired and the hybrid of improvisation and clear-headed direction is one of their most cohesive-sounding, not losing any amount of excitement or fire with the added structure.
On Threace, they prove to be excellent players on a technical level, who can zero in on minute detail and keep stasis interesting.
Threace is a hard-earned kind of exploration, the kind of experimentation made all the weirder for never really seeming weird.
Like the krautrock bands of old, CAVE are masters of naturally stretching out a song. CAVE make major strides stylistically, as well, touching on everything from ’70s porn music (“Slow Bern”) to controlled noise experiments (“Arrow’s Myth”).