The Cat Empire: CINEMA VÉRITÉ

The last time that Melbourne’s awesome The Cat Empire played in Adelaide was at last year’s WOMADelaide Festival to an absolutely enormous audience. Now, the wait is finally over for the follow-up to 2007 album So Many Nights, with The Cat Empire releasing their brand new long player Cinema. While it has been a little while since their last album, the band has spent their time honing their craft and adopting a more mature approach to creating music.

    In the interim key member Harry Angus also got hitched, so the trumpeter and vocalist was in a particularly happy and creative mood when it came to putting Cinema together. Interestingly though, there’s a subtle, darker tinge to some of the album.

    “I think lyrically it’s probably darker,” Harry begins, explaining the mood to me as he calls from a rainy Melbourne. “The thing about lyrics, I don’t think anyone says, ‘I’m going to try and write some darker lyrics now’ - you just write basically whatever you’ve got to write at that time, whatever you’re thinking about or going through. So lyrically, it’s probably a combination of the fact that we’re a bit older now, maybe.

    “Maybe we’ve just dried up the reservoirs of writing about happy stuff all the time,” he chuckles. “But I think there still is a nice blend between the darkness and the musical energy - it’s still there. Also it’s a more subtle recording in certain ways. One criticism I have about a lot of our earlier records is that we almost went in going too hard, almost hyped-up in the way that they were recorded, and this is a much more natural sounding record. So when you put it next to some of that earlier stuff, it definitely sounds tamer, but I think musically it’s just as exciting to play.”

    There’s definitely an element of light and shade to the tunes on Cinema, as the songs manage to convey a strong mood presence.

    “At the end of the day, the last thing we wanted to do was to make a record where we were worried about whether it was the same as our older stuff,” Harry explains. “We just wanted to make music that we were getting excited about. I think a lot of this music is just going to go off live. It’s kind of been put together in a way that I think is just going to open up in our concerts, and is some really exciting fodder for wild improvisations and stuff. I’m looking forward to playing live with it.”

    The subtle vibes present on the album certainly allow for plenty of room for movement, with the band sure to capitalise on their jamming skills when they take the album on the road.

    “That was a very conscious decision, to write music that is going to be able to open up like that. That’s an aspect of the band that we’re really proud of, and it’s also really hard to maintain it. We’re in this world of everyone saying that they want us to keep our songs to three-and-a-half minutes so they can be played on the radio. A lot of our fans now come from a background of not knowing us as a band that jams things out and not really appreciating it either. So it’s really hard to keep that element to our music, and playing night after night, how do you keep it fresh… it needed to be thought about, so that was a big aspect of writing this music.”

    Tunes with massive jammy solos were definitely a feature on albums from days gone by, but for their newbie The Cat Empire were also conscious of keeping things efficient and succinct.

    “We also had that in mind,” Harry chuckles. “I think we had a really clear picture in our heads of basically creating these moods in the songs. I think the last track on the record, Beyond All, which is a track that we all really loved, it actually sounds really different to anything that we’ve recorded before. At the same time it’s very similar to a place that we get to in our live shows a lot of the time. And I’m just really happy that we’ve finally captured that kind of energy on a recording. And the response has been really interesting, ‘cos we’ve had Cat Empire fans saying that they really love it and Cat Empire fans saying they hate it, and also people saying that they used to hate Cat Empire, but they love it… it’s obviously fucking with people’s ideas of what this band should be. And what I find interesting about that is that the feeling of Beyond All is a feeling that we so often get to in our live shows, and it’s always the highlight of our show.”

    In the past, Harry and his fellow Cat Empire singer Felix Riebl were the primary creative forces behind the music on the albums. For Cinema a more encompassing writing environment was sought, so that all members had the opportunity to write and contribute.

    “It was definitely something that we wanted to do,” Harry confides. “It had become really clear to us that our records… it was almost like what we were recording and what we were doing live were pulling in different directions from each other. We’d record a record, then we’d try and play it live. In the process of playing it live it would almost be a process of tearing down the way we’d recorded it and reinventing it. And that was quite fun and quite interesting, but there was always a few songs on every album that maybe I loved but everyone else hates, or everyone else loves but the bass player hates or whatever, so we just wanted to make some music that we could all stand behind and enjoy together.”

The Cat Empire plays Thebarton Theatre with Mama Kin on Wed Sep 1. Cinema is released on Fri Jun 25 through EMI.

Words: Luke Balzan

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