The Cat Empire – Steal The Light (Two Shoes) CD REVIEW

JUST WHAT IS it about Australian bands? How many good ones are there? Two? Five? Ten? The ratio of good to bad is utterly miserable, considering there are 23 million people perching on the edge of that enormous desert.
The Cat Empire, despite the group’s exquisite name, and its equally exquisite cover artwork by Graeme Bass, continues this tradition of naffness. [‘Naff’ meaning uncool, unfashionable, and worthless, for all those who grew up after the 1980s. I guess naff isn’t a very cool, fashionable or worthy way to diss these days, but hey].
Steal The Light is the sixth album by this fusion unit, who started out in 1999 as a jazz-inflected ska band – or was it the other way round? – and have now incorporated Latin rhythms, electronic elements, ‘world’ music samples, turntable scratching and gospel into their armoury of clichés.
Essentially, The Cat Empire is most easily categorised as the Aussie equivalent of The Black Seeds, a Wellington fusion band that continues to be as popular as they are awful; a band without a centre, except for a singer/songwriter who comes up with the most embarrassing cod-philosophies. Steal The Light features no less than two vocalists who inflict their drab lyrics on their long suffering playmates, many of which are the usual blandishments about dancing being the only real escape from life’s ordeals, and a repetitive anti-technology stance. Okay, fair enough taking potshots at people for burying their heads in their smart phones when they could be experiencing life, but do it with wit or humour or find something more gripping to sing about.
There’s even an African-influenced song where the lyric goes: “My heart is beating like a drum”. How daringly original.
Like The Black Seeds, The Cat Empire are musical tourists without an original idea in their heads who have let fundamentally dull songwriters rule the roost. They’d be better down the local playing covers and really getting people off their asses. GARY STEEL
Music = 2.5/5
Sound = 3/5