CD reviews

Cat Party
S/T
(Flat Black Records)
*9.0*
Goes well with: Joy Division, TSOL, early U2 (really)

The southern Orange County trio of Ryan, Richie and Roger made a bit of a splash in Los Angeles with their debut album late last year, landing on more than a few Best-of lists.

And with good reason. The record has an early post-punk feel that’s raw and unpretentious. There’s not a lot of crash and slash but plenty of clean bass lines and guitar fills that contrast nicely with the vocals, almost like new wave without the keyboards. The music feels deliberate, stopping just shy of theatric. Imagine Bauhaus if they’d grown up on skateboards.

“Tar & Feathers” and “Jigsaw Thoughts” are low-key numbers with subdued vocals that can clatter around in the background, but they’re super catchy and will keep popping up in your head, almost insisting that you match words to the rhythms. So when you finally pay attention to the lyrics, it’s like hearing the songs for the first time, which are dark as all get-out.

Cat Party don’t clamor for your attention. They sneak into your subconscious and rattle the door where the bones are stashed. There’s a spooky sense that they’re playing for an audience that isn’t there, a room full of people who have used up all nine of their lives.

—Jim Ruland

Cat Party play Sunday, March 7, at Radio Room.

The Clientele
Bonfires on the Heath
(Merge)
*6.3*
Goes well with: Belle and Sebastian, Camera Obscura, Dean and Britta

If you’re a fan of mellow, orchestrated pop, The Clientele are probably already on your radar. The band is a total throwback to gentle ’60s AM radio and sound about as authentic from that era as one can imagine.

God Save the Clientele (2007) was an exceptionally good album. It was such a perfect collection, in fact, that it’s tough to imagine them topping it. No surprise here: Bonfires does not. It’s still a quality disc; it just lacks the magic that so many of the tracks on the last album so easily delivered.

This album also seems to exist with a bit more space. Instrumentation-wise, it’s certainly more guitar-driven, and I’m not so sure that’s such a great direction. It’s funny how a slightly peppy track like “Sketch” seems to have the velocity of a speed-metal song when compared with the snail’s pace of most of the songs on the earlier disc. But The Clientele are at their best when they’re moving slow—they’re like a tortoise or a reggae band.

And what’s up with “Share the Night”? This is the last band I ever thought would write a song that could pop up as background music on the Spice network. You gotta love how they include those horns amid all that funky guitar, though. They certainly get originality points for bringing their own unique spin to a potential porn song.

—Dryw Keltz

The Clientele play Thursday, March 4, at The Casbah.

jj
N°3
(Secretly Canadian)
*6.7*
Goes well with: Lemon Jelly, Imogen Heap

Recipe for buzz: Name yourself and your records something really hard to Google and BitTorrent; keep your identities secret; release unsettlingly arch-Enya pop.

What do you do on album No. 2? (It’s called N°3 because N°1 was an EP.) First, mute all the infectious world-music melody to vex any fans that possibly liked you without bowing to the weirdness of your project. Second, move your bizarre Meshell Ndegeocello-aping girl vocalist to the front of the mix without any gauzy processing. Third, slather the mess in winsome Badly Drawn Boy strings and halting guitar, just to alienate any stragglers still on board.

Who’s this disc for? Highlight “Let Go” offers a saccharine escape narrative (“Let go, let the wind blow”), complete with island-and-sun imagery and then inverts it with wince-inducing synth harmonica. “Voi Parlate, Lo Gioco” has a sick glockenspiel solo backed by a clubby 808, and “Light” ends with a crass Disney string flourish, for fuck’s sake. There are so many signifiers here that one can’t appreciate this record without an asshole-art-student hat on.

That said, the anonymous chick’s voice is irrepressibly beautiful, in that shameful early Nelly Furtado way, and jj know how to program the hell out of a drum sequence. I suppose this is where we are now—if Girl Talk was the end of sampling, jj is the end of new-age / mature / Afro-Cuban / juju / Paul Simon gesture-checking. Eat a dick, Vampire Weekend.

—Noah Barron