-Well, you managed to make this appointment, and express yourself quite concisely, so I suspect the delusion isn't too deep-seated. I think you'll be fine.
KING OF CATS – AMERICA (Bandcamp
download)
We always feel that a musician must be
doing something right if they violently split opinion – by which we mean the
opinions of dedicated listeners, not the predictable, shallow spats between
reviewers and some teenage band’s friends and family. We have seen King Of Cats provoke more anger
and distress in audiences than is anywhere near common, and we have witnessed
seasoned promoters, engineers and gig-goers in rapt attention, throwing around
terms like “genius” with gay abandon. We
dare say it’s nice to be universally lauded as an artistic messiah, but when
disinterested parties are prepared to spend time arguing about your worth, you
know you’ve made a good start.
Brighton (via Oxford) denizen King Of
Cats has raised these post-gig debates by creating an onstage avant-troubadour persona
that’s half wryly confessional anti-folk Woody Allen, and half punk noise
ointment fly, a japing Loki creating harsh electronic bleeps and screeching
atonally in the middle of quiet ballads. And perhaps this download, billed as the debut
LP, demonstrates a maturing of the Cats sound: the record might be wilfully
lo-fi and amateurishly oblique, but it’s built around real songs, songs that
the King seems to be intent on respectfully delivering, rather than puckishly
destroying. Perhaps, to be brutal, a man
who can’t sing in any conventionally recognised manner has found a way to use
his voice to serve his fascinating little songs. So, only “Recorded at the gathering of the
tribes galley, New York City” (like Brooklyn Beckham, all tracks are simply
named after the US location in which they were created, and all apparent typos
and random capitalisations are the artist’s own) is an ugly King Of Caterwauls screech,
whereas “Recorded at Maggie’s house, San Francisico” is a grunge Dylan buzz,
and “Recorded on a cherry picker in seattle” uses a querulous spider-strand of
a vocal line to sketch out a lyric of melancholic resignation. It’s as if King Of Cats has given up trying
to use his flawed voice to sing, and has worked out how to use it to act. If
it’s good enough for Lou Reed...
Most tracks start and end with the
nostalgic click of a tape recorder, and musically the LP follows suit, being
primarily a collection of sparse, rickety acoustic skeletons on the verge of
collapsing into dust, but this awkward delicacy serves the fragmented intimacy
of the lyrics perfectly. There are some
subtly lovely touches too, “Recorded on a plane, in the high desert and
seattle” pitching an almost melodic croon against some thin, stately keys, like
The Folk Implosion channelling Federico Mompou, and our favourite, “Recorded in
the damp in New Orleans” coming off like some spectral, netherworld Paul Simon
duetting with a chirruping digital canary.
The unexpected tinny electronic drums on the closing track also offer a
pleasing palette change.
Lyrically, like most Cats tracks, America’s songs are emotional, diaristic
outbursts refracted and atomised until they read like emo haikus, but at their
best they can be surprising, funny and moving.
“Recorded Next to the traintracks inFlagstaff Arizona” is our pick,
opening with the typically opaque, “I bet you six pounds you’ll get what you
want to, by the end of October”. There’s
a defeated bohemian air to lines like this, like a beat poet who has thrown out
the asocial boasting and outsider celebrations (we always felt that Ginsberg at
least partly saw “Howl” part one as a checklist), and replaced them with
distanced self-disgust. “Let’s prove
we’re men by lighting fires and pissing them out again”, as a repeated refrain sardonically
advises.
We’re not going to claim this album is
great – at times it’s not even any good – but it does feel like a worthwhile
work of art, at once heartfelt and deliberately confounding. A local reviewer can spend a lot of time
listening to music designed to rock a chum’s VI form ball, or calculated to
attract a Radio 2 playlister, and that’s fine, but it’s always wonderful to
hear idiosyncratic music made solely for the tiny fraction of the world who
will understand it, even if we don’t always feel ourselves to be part of that miniscule
fraternity. One glorious moment in
“Recorded in golden gate park, San Francisco,at the end of a show” sums up King
Of Cats’s relaxed artistry, as we hear his keening voice in the background, and
some audience members jockishly high-fiving next to the recording mike: If you
find something to love in King Of Cats, you’ll be welcomed with open arms, but
if you don’t, there’s no pressure. You
might even find yourself on his next LP.
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