REVIEW: Catatonia, Equally Cursed and Blessed (Atlantic)
- Niles Baranowski
Catatonia lead singer Cerys Matthews is blessed with the sort of versatile, show-stopping voice that the Alanises of the world would kill for. She can soothe and seethe with equal facility and her earthy groan sounds as confident and forceful as it does sexual. When she hisses "Joan of Arc can kiss my arse,"the gravelly sass in her voice is worth the price of admission, an attitude that you could fall in love with.
The curse in Catatonia's third album, then, is the rest of her band, who can at best underscore her vocals and at worse can undercut them; they don't seem to have enough of their own will to create any counterpoint. On their last album, International Velvet, that wasn't the problem it is here since the songs were, on the whole, straightforward rave-ups that went down free of complication. The two top-selling singles from that album are represented here: "Road Rage" and "Mulder and Scully," a pair of rockers so anthemic that you may find yourself humming the latter as the credits to the X-Files roll. They display succinctly the force that is missing from Equally Cursed and Blessed, modern rock at its cathartic, lusty best.
Cursed is a more subdued affair, its volume middling and its songs usually confining themselves to a single dynamic level. There are a few sappy tracks where Matthews feels overwhelmed by canned violins. "Bulimic Beats" gets gummed up in a wall of strings that makes one long for the minimalism of Phil Spector. "Dead From the Waste Down" is a lyrically interesting bedroom plea (think Summer of Love meets the old adage "make hay while the sun shines") that has no musical force, just a sort of lazy prettiness. Even a bouncing tune like "Karaoke Queen" is bland and grating when performed by the dull rhythm section of bassist Paul Jones and drummer Dafydd Iuean.
"Karaoke Queen" used to be the sort of sprightly, innocuous single candidate that Catatonia excelled at back in the days of Way Beyond Blue but Matthews is maturing too much as a singer to be contented with mere pop now. Her best tracks take on the strength of performance pieces; they're like hysteric monologues set to music. On "Shoot the Messenger," she plots drunken revenge and it sounds like seduction. Her coarse coyness makes comparisons to Tom Waits hardly unlikely. And when she can unleash her force against something specific, the results are dynamite, like the snide "Londinium" ("London doesn't sleep, it just sucks"). "Post Script" is the most fully-shaped story here, Matthews talking about how she gave her girlhood to a slick-talking shyster and there's not a word of regret here because "if you live a lie, you die a liar." No prissy little-girl romanticism, just a mess of lip-smacking attitude.
Finally, if you want your daily requirement of Cerys without worrying about even the vaguest requirements of song form, you may be interested in "Storm the Palace," two minutes of Cerys whipping a crowd into a castle-torching frenzy. There's no verse, no break, no chorus, just the moment where drunkenness becomes revolutionary fervor -- all distilled into distortion. As the middle ground between the gonzo acid kool-aid of the Super Furry Animals and the brash, brainy "dad rock" of the Manic Street Preachers, Catatonia are far from the most revolutionary band on the Welsh music scene. Don't be surprised if you start following Cerys Matthews with a near-revolutionary fervor, though.
