Cats:for:Peru – Attack of the Pitching Machine

 

The skinny: Indie sea of rock with a dark riptide creeping about (will explain later).

The review (proper): Hailing from Sheffield and formed from the ashes of other bands, the combined experience of all members show in the broad range of feelings and musical genres mish mashed together. This is a lethal cocktail of an album.

Kickstarting the whole bag is ‘Manifesto’, swaggering about with that oh-so-ubiquitous but yet so lovable weapon of indie bands, the microKorg! Add to it a good dose of ukelele and you’ve got instantaneous indie cred. Then descend into some heavy riffage.

Wait, what? Ay, ay, ay, me gusta mucho! This sort of sly surprises, consisting of an unannounced change of pace (and genre) will be Cats:for:peru (now with more colon!) calling card for the rest of the album. And it’s excellent AND deftly executed.

Of course, you can disagree, because, as ‘Manifesto’ says: “your internet opinions mean nothing to me”.

The songs do cover several genres and it would be hard to categorise them, so, let’s not. Ditto for comparing with other bands. Now, let’s go over some of the stand out tracks…

-‘Love in a lift’ goes out with quite a fight, using an epic ending that begs for fireworks, lasers and all that carbon-footprint shit reserved for stadium bands. But spectacle aside, this is some pretty good music that needs no pyrotecnics to call your attention.

-‘Asleep in Monaco’ is amazingly sweet.

-Sometimes I feel bands know when they have a rope a dope combination in their albums and they just disregard the listener and go straight for our collective glassjaws. This point (that I just made up and will abuse in all my subsequent reviews) is in the form of the knock out combo of ‘Cutting the bridges in half’ (the one I mentioned with a dark understream) and the chilling “hey-it’s dance rock-wahey-no-it’s summink else!” ‘I love you more than evolution’.

-That break in ‘Answers’ is spine tingling.

The album does lose a bit of steam (in a good way, inspiration is still brimming here!) at the final three tracks, but hey, an intensive cardio exercise does deserve some cooling down period. And after using every single damn genre they could get their paws on (seriously, I think there’s even some country chords hidden there!), it’s a slow, calm goodbye. The kind that leaves you longing for more.

Not much else to say (or gush, like I do, sigh), but it’s a great band to see live. This is indie  with some serious bite(sorry, I had to put a genre). Thread the water carefully, here be some fierce cats.

—Sam

About the author: Wishes he had an ukelele and could do some heavy riffage. Also, found out in Easter that Jesus likes trilby hats. Also, he was longing for someone but got a text message from said friend and now feels happy.

Links

Official Website

Join them at their Facebook group!

Listen to them at Myspace.

Follow them at Twitter.

Get a double double good mp3 from the band right here.