Heave Media

Summer Cats are Dirty Rock from Down Under

Songs for Tuesdays won't last all week, but certainly until Friday.

Summer Cats

Songs for Tuesdays

Released on Jul 14, 2009

Listening to the debut LP from the winsome Melbourne quintet, Summer Cats, presented problems, largely stemming from my inability to dissociate the concept of “summer cat” from this image:

Ever dutiful, I persevered, and discovered upon further review that Songs For Tuesdays is a mostly charming exercise in warm-weather jangle and can-do attitude that begs to be blasted from your car, windows down.

The album opens with “Let’s Go,” a well-executed psych-surf workout featuring a front-of-the-mix organ that would not be out of place on one of the legendary “Nuggets” recordings of the late 1960s. A deceptively simple hook, fittingly featuring the lyric “let’s go,” gives way to a “na na na” sing-along chorus that does proud the girl groups it emulates. The catchiness of the opener surfaces continually through much of the record’s brisk thirty-minute runtime, particularly in late-album beach party “St. Tropez,” a fantasist’s “anywhere-but-here” exploration of the band’s disparate influences. The presentation of a choice between playing kissy-face with Nico and starting a bar-fight with Bob Dylan has likely never been so well-stated. Ask Lou Reed, I suppose.

It isn’t all smiles. The record is occasionally beset by inconsistent songwriting and moments of instrumental weakness.  The well-intentioned rocker “Fulton Gurls” misses the mark in its attempt to approximate Elvis Costello, whose early records with the Attractions are a particular touchstone for the band. Later in the record, the witty concept and nice guitar work of “Maybe Pile” is offset by a forced drum beat and poor vocal phrasing. The worst offender is the multi-section “Camel Cords,” which juxtaposes complex instrumental changes with an undeveloped and slightly off-key melody to nearly disastrous effect.

Still, there is much to like about the band and its potential. Album highlight “Wilde Rice” recalls the great Scottish pop of the past decade and features one of the nicer vocal performances I’ve heard this year.  The memorable catch-line of the verse imploring a lover to “talk about the weather” is a first-class hook, as well as a nice lyrical nod to the brief detour the song offers from the album’s generally sunny aesthetic. “Rice” and the engaging Rhodes piano-featuring “Christopher Wren” suggest that we can expect great things as the band matures and finds a more consistent songwriting voice.

Bonus points awarded for great production throughout the record. Double points for the cute cover art. Really, it’s seriously fucking adorable, with birds.

Posted by Miguel Harvey on Jul 14, 2009 @ 6:30 am