Record Reviews
Dallas
By Max Easton
Hobart duo The Native Cats are as strange and contradictory as ever on their third album. It’s full of unlikely successes resulting from questionable choices, writes MAX EASTON.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] The Native Cats’ home of Tasmania can be an unnerving place to visit: stretches of forest crawl down mountains to the edge of the ocean as a backdrop to some of the most ghastly infringements of human rights in Australia’s colonial history. It’s an eerie contradiction, where pleasant streets and friendly locals have evolved from a distant history of tortured natives and cannibalised convicts. Hobart’s The Native Cats are made up of two such locals: a band that, like their hometown, also deals in contradictions and dichotomies.
The Native Cats are Julian Teakle on bass and Peter Escott on hard-hitting vocals and cheap electronics. They play at a strange melding of post-punk and experimental tinkering with disconcerting results, yet they’re intent on presenting a self-deprecating and comedic front. Their press shots taken atop Hobart’s Mount Wellington feature Escott in a pink jumper and track pants staring dumbly at the camera, thus destroying any mystery or romance the setting could have yielded. Yet the music they create is every bit as ominous and brooding as the towering mountain that lords over the city.
Their live show also offers two sides of the coin. It’s a confronting aural experience, but it’s delivered with a self-aware and mocking swagger that obscures the driving intent behind Escott’s lyrics. The Native Cats subvert the image and aesthetic of their more serious peers for a laughing aside that’s entirely separate to what appears on record, with any lingering subversion obliterated by the alternatively moving and languid music presented on Dallas. This is where the dichotomy can confuse. You stare at the promotional animated gif of the two throwing snow then waving gaily. Then you listen to Escott snarl “All of your friends carry knives and lunge at shadows” and wonder – should you be taking this seriously, or are you somehow being fucked with?
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]
The Native Cats’ brand of ‘electronic pub-rock’ acts as a way of allowing the repressed rockist a window for appreciating approximations of electronic or dance music from the comforting angle of a knowing smirk from the back of the pub. In that sense, Dallas is an exercise in duality. This album comes packaged with irony-laced promotional images and a hilarious press release that claims parts of Dallas to be “precisely the sort of hazardous move that exists solely to be vetoed,” but in taking the languid back-alley doorway to pop music, they’ve created a peculiar and uncompromising beast.
It starts with Teakle’s bass playing: active spines that writhe strangely through the pre-programmed drum machine and various electronic additions of Escott that come from cheap audio gear and a Korg emulator wedged into a hand-held Nintendo. Then Escott’s subtly echoed vocal is floated on top of it all, dancing tentatively over Teakle’s bass lines before leaping alarmingly from them for emphasis. It may not be a conventionally pleasing aesthetic, but that’s entirely The Native Cats’ go anyway. It leaves just enough to keep you steady, before absurd sonic venturing fills the spaces between lengthy passages that paddle uncomfortably down Escott’s stream of consciousness.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Dallas, despite coming across as a singular package, takes no cemented route. It shoots from the minimalist bass-and-vocal opener of ‘Pane e Aqua’ to a track like ‘Cavalier,’ where a trademark Teakle bass line underlies a drum machine roll that’s like a snap-frozen mockery of ’90s techno ‘oonce oonce’. For most, almost everything on this album will appear out-of-place or ill-advised, but the trick for The Native Cats is to take all these odd ideas and make the time spent deciphering them worthwhile. Ultimately, it’s Peter Escott’s ability to snap from absurd meanderings to harsh realities that makes Dallas more than just an experimental curiosity.
“Just two guys in a shitty bar playing ugly music that no one would ever choose to listen to until they heard it.”
Escott’s straight-laced, spoken-word simplicity lends an eerie sincerity to his lyrics. The lack of a conventional vocal presence paired with the minimal instrumental surrounds actually allows it to take the fore. Take ‘Cavalier,’ ‘I Remember Everyone’ and ‘C of O,’ three songs that cover doubt and emasculation; entrapment and anxiety; and the complexities of love, respectively, and then consider whether any of those subjects have ever really required shouts, yelps or wavering croons after Escott addresses them so straightly. This is why The Native Cats work; neither Escott nor Teakle inhabit anything but what their songs present. There’s no Kaufman-esque audience baiting, no would-be epileptic planted in the crowd and no carefully tailored front – just two guys in a shitty bar playing ugly music that no one would ever choose to listen to until they heard it, and it’s here that Escott drops you into his chasm of everyman anxieties.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]The Native Cats - Cavalier by R.I.P SOCIETY RECORDS
“You’ve gotta love yourself and you’ve got to trust yourself/but there are parts of yourself that you can’t rate yourself,” Escott sings on ‘Cavalier,’ taking only three lines for the insecurities to kick in from what seemed like a dot-point self-help guide to the pursuit of self-esteem. In its beat sourced from a sleazy nightclub and cooled to a perverted crawl comes suggested sexual doubts and inferiority complexes, where the commuter train to his lover’s house weaves an extended metaphor behind 32-bit hammerings. “It’s the starting and the stopping/and I’m lost and undressing,” he sings powerless, and when the confidence or swagger never comes, he’s left calling “what it means to me only” appreciatively into an echo in acknowledgement of its solitary significance. When The Native Cats do bewilderment, loneliness and uncertainty thematically, all those sparse and veering arrangements begin to make a lot of sense.
These feelings of entrapment in undesirable personal flaws extend to the locations surrounding the characters of Dallas. ‘I Remember Everyone’ bleeds with the sense of being caved-in in familiar and repetitive realms, an agitated ode to small-town woes where the concept of knowing everyone’s name slowly and grindingly becomes infuriating. Teakle’s bass line panics under Escott’s solemn gibbering, tracing small talk and posturing bar-side complaints as resigned observations that grow into impotent threats. “You mess with my friends you mess with me/Luckily you’re only messing with me,” he slurs, a life in small circles, where pretended gusto and masculinity in the pursuit of honour leaves him alone, friendless and, ultimately, under attack. And then there’s the unsettling truth that any fuckup in this company is permanent. Blinkered, bitted and whipped onto an infinitely circular track, where “strangers come and go/and if you want you can pretend/but I’m running out of people to never see again.”
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]The Native Cats - I Remember Everyone by R.I.P SOCIETY RECORDS
Powerlessness is a common theme: characters are powerless to find sexual confidence, powerless to escape their confines and powerless to avoid emotional torment. There’s a moment early on in the album’s romantic epic ‘C of O’ that leaves a guy lost in inner recollections of progressively growing horror, returning from his internal freak-out to find himself alone at an emotional rock bottom soundtracked by a mechanical whirring. Here, as the song changes pace and becomes an ode to his eventual romantic saviour, is where The Native Cats are at their best. “I used to carry a legend to the human face/Now I know a feeling when it fills me,” moans the healed, before continuing with his devotion and gratitude: “This is my page about you/and how you pulled me out of the tar.”
“An album likely to divide opinion if it ever reaches far enough to.”
As Escott murmurs into a microphone while scribbling wryly at a Nintendo and Teakle stands awkward and patiently thumping away at his bass, you wonder how this could ever have yielded anything so worthwhile. Packaging experimentation and earnest poetic songwriting into a singular and palatable piece of work, it manages to avoid getting lost in forced provocation, insincere labelling or worse: art-wank.
It’s their self-deprecating modesty that makes this all the more surprising, an album of understanding middle-grounds and teetering extremes that are likely to divide opinion if it ever reaches far enough to rouse the discussion. And when all those opinions are drawn, Escott has already embedded a lyric that paints the place of the Native Cats. “You come back and it’s just music/You come back and it’s just noise,” he mutters into the void. “And all the people have gone.”
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