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Listen carefully to “Love Comes Close,” the most recent album by the Philadelphia indie band Cold Cave, and the kaleidoscopic swirls of a dream-filled night come swimming into focus.

It's not surprising, really, given the labor of love Wesley Eisold went through to make it. It's a night record, he told The Daily Times this week, and comparing it to a dream is apropos.

“It's an image-driven process, and the majority of the record was kind of done in bed, so it's fitting that it would be sleepy and hazy at times,” he said. “It was made through the ups and downs of going to bed and not being able to sleep and waking up in the middle of the night thinking about it and recording from bed.

“I also wanted it to go hand-in-hand with just walking around at night, through the city by yourself or on a train ride. It's definitely night music; it's not intended for the day. I wanted it to be semi club-oriented without it being an outright club record.”

To achieve that goal, Eisold and his bandmates turned back the clock roughly 25 years, channeling a distinct '80s vibe into the pulsating beats, dissonant sound effects and hypnotic rhythms. If it sounds more pop-oriented than fans of Cold Cave might be used to, that's intentional, he added.

“We wanted to record more pop-driven music, but I think a lot of the elements are experimentations as well,” he said. “Our early material was much more blown-out and distorted and more influenced by noise than music. I wanted to keep some elements of that but also make something new.”

A quick glance at the pedigrees of the individual band members reveals an extensive background in underground music. Eisold, a writer, has played in punk and noise-rock bands for years; vocalist Caralee McElroy has spent the past several years performing and touring with Xiu Xiu; Dominick Fernow, in addition to his work with noise-outfit Prurient, owns the New York label and record store Hospital Productions.

Eisold, however, remains at its core — a dark one, as it turns out. Publicity information on the group's Web site describes him as “an absolute new young god of nihilism and despair” who ruminates often on death and what it all means.

“I don't see any separation between the music I make and how I live day-to-day,” he said. “I would imagine some people feel separated from what they're doing artistically, but I don't feel that I do or that any of the members of this band do. I think death — and the trillions of off-shooting questions that come from it — are difficult to not think about.

“But that's just one facet of inspiration. I think, more than anything, I'm fascinated by how driven by time that we are, culturally. It's literally all about time running out and how it's important to do as much as you can with the allotted time that you have, even if it is limited.”

With “Love Comes Close” — and with music in general — Eisold finds a way to describe emotions of angst and darkness and unease with a broad palette of colors. Through the heavy use of synthesizer, he captures the jackrabbit flash of neon in the darkened window of a pawn shop, after hours ... the staccato flash of streetlights blinking through the up-and-down interference of windshield wiper blades ... the lost-in-thought meanderings down a cracked sidewalk until, broken from reverie, this listener finds he's wandered into strange and unrecognizable territory.

“For me, with music more than anything, I'm concerned with context,” he said. “I think the point of music is to express things we can't say with words, and it just so happened at a point in my life that that's what I wanted to hear — a soundtrack to my daily thoughts. That's what I was interested in doing.”

“Love Comes Close,” he added, wasn't meant for widespread distribution. A limited number of 1,000 copies were printed and sold at shows before indie label Matador Records picked it up, and while he's grateful for the helping hand, it's also incentive to get started on the next album and to make it an even more complex journey.

“It's going to carry over a lot of the pop elements from ‘Love Comes Close' —

those were the first songs I'd ever written like that, and now I feel like I know what I'm doing more and have a better vision for it,” he said. “In the end, I'd like to think we can make a more cohesive album.”