Cult Caves and the wistful nature, eclipsing existential grief of "Tiny Figures"

 

"You drift along / With no thought for tomorrow ‘till it comes / You shake it off / Walk back into the night with / Hope aloft..."

The wistful nature, eclipsing existential grief of "Tiny Figures" by Cult Caves, the solo indie project of Utah-based singer-songwriter / musician Tyson Henrie, seeps under your emotional skin easy. Maybe it is the kind of crystalline guitar rhythm or Henrie's vocal countenance, introspective and a bit forlorn. The heavy choppy guitar, flailing drums, booming bass, and layered in other pearly guitars collide and unify at the same time creating aesthetic that feels intimate and vast at the same time. In the end (and throughout) "Tiny Figures" is that kind of song that punches you in the gut and has you attaching your own sadness, your own stories to it while trying to read between the lines. The lyrics do share certain storylines but they are poetically drawn as to not reveal absolutely everything but Henrie, courtesy of the liner notes does, making the song even more real, more tragic and touching. 

LINER NOTES (excerpted / bracketed): 

[A year ago, my friend Chris Coy — an artist, still in his forties — died suddenly in Las Vegas, the city where he lived and where I grew up. A month before he died, he had a dream that left him with a single line: "All of us tiny painted figures in the landscape of God."

This song grew out of that line, and out of everything surrounding it: Chris's death, his widow's grief (she was part of my childhood too), and older wounds I've carried from growing up in Vegas — stories of friends who did violent things, crimes I was close enough to that innocence feels like the wrong word for any of us. Some of those friends are gone now, and their absence lives alongside the grief of the people who loved them.

But the song is also about a quieter kind of loss — the kind that doesn't leave a body. The slow disappearance of political conviction, of friendships that once felt permanent, of faith in the religion you were handed as a child. And underneath all of it: the strangeness of coming from a place like Las Vegas, a desert city that never quite feels real, and the particular kind of people that unreality tends to collect.

I'd also been reading Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus — his framing of the absurd felt like it belonged in the same room as all of this.

The lyrics don't announce any of this. Some of it is buried, tucked into small moments and specific images. But the weight is there. Tidbits of stories in this song have life behind it.]

- Robb Donker Curtius

LYRICS

You drift along
With no thought for tomorrow
‘till it comes
You shake it off
Walk back into the night with
Hope aloft

They fled already, she said
Son, don’t worry
I won’t call the cops
A blanket over me
I fell asleep there
On the warm asphalt

Hey hey hey hey hey
Worn are we
In our desert absurdity

The summer of,
I took a job
to paint the parking garage
at the Horseshoe, and
the Sunrise mountain
wholly made of sand

Hey hey hey hey hey
Warm are we
In our desert ab-
surdity

But time will shape
Love’s relief
In our holy chambers
of grief

Tiny figures, we’re
painted on-
to a broken land
scape of God

Time will shape
our love’s niche
In the holy chambers
Of grief






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THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM 

https://open.spotify.com/artist/3zspmWtDKcQq2NLzmDz6Ni

https://www.instagram.com/cultcaves/

https://www.facebook.com/tyson.henrie

https://cultcaves.bandcamp.com/track/tiny-figures


Tyson first wrote songs as a teenage singer in a 90's Las Vegas punk band, opening for popular acts including The Offspring and Rancid. After fronting the college indie band Arson Car he toured briefly as bassist and backup vocalist in the band Big Talk - solo project of Ronnie Vannucci (The Killers).

Cult Caves, solo indie project, singer-songwriter / musician Tyson Henrie, "Tiny Figures", cathartic, indie rock, post punk, neo wave, Utah, Las Vegas, emotionally deep lyrics, existential dread, grief, survivorship,