Villains of the Moon

Cold Cave traffics in the romance of ruin, and "Villains of the Moon" is perhaps the most nakedly romantic thing Wesley Eisold has ever committed to tape. The synthesizers arrive like floodwater — slow, inexorable, pooling in the low frequencies before cresting into something almost cinematic. A drum machine keeps mechanical time beneath it all, clinical and cold against the warmth Eisold somehow wrings from the arrangement. His vocal delivery sits in that particular register between spoken word and song, world-weary but not defeated, intimate in the way a confession made at 3 a.m. is intimate. The song concerns itself with outsiderdom as identity, with finding a kind of doomed nobility in existing outside what the daylight world considers worthwhile. There's a lineage here running straight through Bauhaus and early Depeche Mode — the goth romanticism of black-clad figures claiming the margins as their own territory. But Eisold filters that tradition through something more literary, more self-aware. This is a song for the drive home from a show that ended too late, streetlights strobing through the windshield, the city feeling briefly and completely like yours.