Boston's Cave In is a band that trades on creating grand guitar soundscapes, using multitudes of voicings, from distorted to crisp and clean - they layer and intertwine guitars in great reverb-laden walls of sound. (Not unlike a band I used to enjoy called Kitchens of Distinction.) Sometimes you'll hear a dissonant gothic feed-back lurking in the shadows, a.l.a. early Robin Guthrie (Cocteau Twins). There are also moments on this album that smack of Opeth's (check out what great guitarists we are outing) Damnation.

For Antenna, the band worked with the versatile Rich Costey, who has produced everyone from Rival Schools and Audioslave to Jurassic 5, and if anything he honed down their sound into shorter and more Radio-friendly bite-sized tunes, with the exception of the 8 minute prog-rock experimental jam "Seafrost." This tune finds the band using the alien terrain once inhabited by Yes. The bass-lines in particular are vintage Chris Squire, and much of it sounds like a tribute band doing a less than faithful cover of "Close to the Edge." Not being a prog-basher like most critics - I enjoyed this obvious tip of the hat to one of the greatest bands ever. (I like Genesis and King Crimson, and Gentle Giant and all the rest of them - I'm sick with it, so go screw yourself all you pretentious prog-bashing fuck-heads. Pull your head out of your ass.)

In most ways, this album bears the closest resemblance to last years debut by (here I go) And You Will Know Us By Our Trail of Dead. They need to abbreviate that name of theirs, it affects how much I like their music. In terms of the songwriting and tunesmanship, singer-guitarist Stephen Brodsky uses devices reminiscent of The Posies, and on their poppier tracks a little Teenage Fanclub. The biggest problem with Antenna is that Brodsky tunes into the same frequency song in and song out. His melodic devices become so predictable that if you had the lyrics you could sing along note-for-note on your first spin.

I'd have to give these guys a fairly strong recommendation, particularly if you're interested in any of the bands I've compared to. And if it weren't for Brodsky's same-every-song melodic devices and chord progressions I would have awarded it with a good four. As it stands 3 1/2 is as far as I can go. You can literally hear one song on this album and you've pretty much heard them all.