This Charming Caveman

Matthew Iwanusa, Jimmy Carbonetti and Stefan Marolachakis, three New York City natives, have been hanging out for seven or eight years. Iwanusa and Carbonetti played in the angular rock outfit known as The Subjects. They shared the stage often with Marolachakis. He crooned in the now-defunct Flameshovel outfit The End Of The World. Before they came of age, Iwanusa and Carbonetti met Jeff Berrall, a bartender at the now boarded-up bar Sin-e on the Lower East Side—The Subjects performed there from time-to-time. At that point, Berrall jammed on bass for second-wave post-punkers Elefant. All of them would later meet Sam Hopkins, who played for a group known as White Clam, at 30th Street Guitars, where he and Carbonetti worked.

From that convoluted string of surnames and bands and places emerged something primitive: Caveman, the quintet’s new band. It came together with Iwanusa on lead vocals and guitar, Marolachakis on drums, Carbonetti on guitar, Hopkins on keys and Berrall on bass. Though the band has only released a trio of singles on the Internet, the unsigned group is sitting on an in-the-can, full-length LP. Nick Stumpf of The French Kicks recorded and mixed it at Love Boat studios in Dumbo. And all signs point to that unheard, unmastered, unsigned record being one of the more potentially great debuts in some time.

"All of us have a relatively long history of playing in bands around town," Marolachakis says. "The nice thing is if you start new bands, working relationships you’ve made with other people don’t just disappear. Sometimes you think when a band breaks up: Was it all just pissing in the wind? But it never is."

Over the years, the band members say they’ve collectively played thousands of shows at many levels. But at a lucky point in time, the five found themselves without musical outlets. So, at the end of 2009, Iwanusa led the charge, gathering the group—at that point just five friends— together. They’d take the band name from one of Iwanusa’s many inexplicable nicknames (logic by which the band could easily have been named Pickle).

Within a month of its first rehearsal, Caveman played Bowery Ballroom, opening for White Rabbits. Together now for only a year and change, Caveman played a slew of shows at South By Southwest last month. And April 14, the band returns to the Bowery Ballroom to open for folkie favorites Wye Oak. A month out from that show, Caveman will hit the road with Here We Go Magic for its longest tour yet.

"I think it’s that it’s just a case of really good timing," Marolachakis says. "The band started and it seemed like all of a sudden we were making the kind of music we would want to listen to right now."

And we want to listen to it, too. Caveman has a way of exploding into impacts with understated tension—the vibing keys often play a dissonant foil to the direct, bright sound of the guitar. A Grizzly Bear comparison surely will rear its head when these guys blow up, given the tasteful rhythm section and doo-wop fourpart harmonies. But there’s something more accessible about Caveman. The band, in its subtlety, opts for driving, twostep drumbeats. Though thick in harmony at times, Caveman pulls off incredibly catchy hooks, like the falling melodic title line of "Decide" in that song’s chorus, stuck in our heads for days now. And the band’s lyrics are nowhere near as oblique. For example, from the bouncy, bright "December 28": "This won’t go away/ I know it’s true/ My love is here to stay." Sure, it reads simply. But in the expert mix, presented in the cascading vocals of Iwanusa, it comes off as confessional rather than clichéd. It’s clean. It’s puttogether. It’s tasteful. And we love it.

But we wouldn’t call the band straightforward. Despite turning off to overwrought aspects of the scene at large (dense reverb or fuzzed-out guitar for example), the band manages to be part of a very contemporary canon. Caveman plays with atmospherics without getting lost in the clouds, tamper with drone and repetition without getting hypnotic. Take the ballooning keyboard interlude on "December 28" as one touchstone. There’s something ghostly, definitely otherworldly about Caveman. But it also comes down to hitting that familiar chord.

And that’s probably why they cohere as a band so well: it’s still just five familiar faces getting together to jam. On a given day, the five guys can be found at Carbonetti’s guitar shop, Cobra Guitars, in Lower East Side, listening to Ronnie Wood and Peter Tosh records.

"We failed at our attempt to see Tron 3D together," Marolachakis says. "But besides that, we do a pretty good job as friends." 

>>Caveman April 14, 

Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.),

 212-533-2111; 8, $15.