I’ve never been to Los Angeles. I’ve gotten close a few times. I probably won’t make it there in this lifetime. America in 2025 is a spike trap I’m not interested in navigating at my age.
Cold Cave is a musical project created by Wesley Eisold, an American artist, writer, musician, and vocalist. Eisold is based out of Los Angeles, where goth-influenced music proliferates. Cold Cave has been an active project since 2007, and Eisold has released a trio of full-length albums and a dozen EPs under this name since then.
Eisold appears leathery and distant in my imagination. His poetry and lyrics are personal, nihilistic, and generally concerned with our relationships to others and forces outside us. Sometimes his writing is funny as well, albeit in a manner consistent with his general vibe. “Love come close but chooses to spare me,” he sings in the opening song on Cold Cave’s album, Love Comes Close. I like the tongue-in-cheek possibilities of this lyric. I think it embodies the elements of goth music that resonate with me. Nihilism, sarcasm, vulnerability, and honesty captured in black wrapping paper with silver embossed skulls and roses.
I’m such a sucker for the performative aspects of goth culture. My own weird neurodivergent teen years were defined by performing myself for my peers. I remain soft to black dresses, white faces, and tall boots.
This is all pretty reductive. Eisold is an artist producing music that ranges out past all this. Cold Cave is as comfortable being decaying noise as it is dark toned pop music. I like the unfastened edges of these albums. There is something unfinished about Cold Cave songs I find compelling. Even as the pop influence firms up in the latest album Passion Depression, the sense that the whole song could devolve into static and tone remains.
When I was in love with my best friend in high school but didn’t have the words or community to understand that love, him and I would routinely sit in his bedroom and listen to Depeche Mode and smoke cigarettes on his balcony. Between us was an imagined world of sweeping black coats, gaudy silver crosses, and a lot of folks striking dramatic poses. My daughter explains this as “aura farming” today. Despite growing up on the prairies, this is the only farming I think I have ever done.
It didn’t work out between me and the best friend.
I have never let go of that boy on the balcony smoking and dreaming of a cooler world than Saskatoon. When I get a chance to stare at the stars, it’s always a song like “Glory” playing in my head. Los Angeles remains a made-up place.
“The sun sets so early in December
The moon is bright and my heart is black
Promise me you'll always remember
Never to find our way back”