If the abundance of metal, hardcore, tejano, and country music in San Antonio doesn’t impress you, perhaps Alamo City’s freshest indie-rock group can entice you.
Cadherin’s debut album “While They’re Away” is a tight effort with deeply impressive results. It’s a sonic playground. Even at its saddest and most angsty, the playful melodies, twinkles, vocals, and groovy bass work is genuinely joyful. The band themselves claim to draw on a wide selection of influences, something that becomes increasingly obvious the more familiar one becomes with their signature textured artistry. If you’re a fan of pop bands like The Rare Occasions, indie rock keystones like Built to Spill, or post-rock bands like Tortoise, give the new Cadherin a spin.
Built off of the catchy flow of the first song, “Homestead”, the album’s debut sentiment is “I’m not the man I’m meant to be.” It’s incredibly important to highlight this; for an album written by high schoolers, the maturity of this record is impressive and strong. In fact, it’s a benefit. Where some bands would take an interesting sound and blend of influences and create what is the equivalent of a second-rate “midwest emo” effort, Cadherin shoots higher. Much higher. Like the second song suggests, the album itself is a Babylonian skyscraper that is constantly reaching upwards. The endless yearning and hopeless romanticism of the lyrical themes transcends each and every track without losing its maturity.
This reaching is appropriate as the album itself reaches for broken relationships, what it means to grow up, old friendships, missed opportunities, and loneliness. Even less serious moments on the album (most specifically “(Give Us) Twenty-Two Minutes”) is kept in place by the poppy warmth of the riffs and bouncy rhythms. Songs like “Eighteen Years” and “Eighteen Years (Later)” provide insight into the experimentalism of the group, including two entirely different versions of the same song — and it’s hard to say which is better.
“Better Than You” is the real mark of experimentalism, and proof that the band is open to anything. A seven minute track can be hard to pull off, especially on such a quick, and well-paced album, but Cadherin isn’t afraid of bold moves and big ideas. The song goes from a slow-dancing sway to a frenzied festival of combining sounds, eventually culminating in a beautiful ending track: “Now I’m Alone”.
There’s a lot of pain in Cadherin’s debut, but it’s never painful. The regrets are taken on
the chin with a smile, and the ending track – despite threatening to leave us alone – doesn’t feel
like an abandonment, but rather like a soft goodbye that will hopefully be followed by Cadherin’s
next efforts. Listen to “While They’re Away” wherever you listen to music, and follow the band
on their socials. I’ve been lucky enough to see them, and I highly recommend it.
You can find Cadherin’s debute album “While They’re Away” on Spotify and Apple Music.