From A Whisker To A Scream

Before we start: a confession. I have nothing new to say about Cat Malojian. At the end of last year, on the strength of their wonderful self-titled debut LP, I had them down as the North’s best band.

Eight months later, and after a week in the company of its follow-up, The Dawn Chorus, I’m going have to repeat myself:
Cat Malojian are the North’s best band.
I’m not alone in thinking this. Pretty much anyone who heard their last record remarked on what a special thing it was. Unfortunately, while its scope was huge, like any self-released recording, its restricted wing-span could only ever take it so far.
“It was a weird one,” says singer and main songwriter, Stevie Scullion. “Any feedback we got was great and really encouraging. But you know how it is, it’s difficult getting people to listen to it. At the end of the day, Johnny (Toman — multi-instrumentalist and co-founder) and I keep saying the same thing: if we keep going, keep writing and recording the way we are, someday, someone is going to pick up on it.”
It’s a strange business. Failing to find an audience because your record is crap is one thing. Failing to find one when it’s very obviously not, stings in a different way.
“It wrecked our heads,” he says. “And we wondered for a while about doing it by the book, like everyone else does. But then we just decided, fuck it. We’re not like that. We’re not really part of the scene. Our faces don’t fit. We’re happier playing in folk clubs and aul’ lads pubs than in indie venues in Belfast, and we don’t want to change that. We do things our own way.”
Scullion is a laid-back bloke, but if you want to see his spine straighten, ask if he ever thinks of giving up.
“It’ll come good,” he insists. “We’ve a long-term attitude. I was talking to Johnny’s uncle Patsy about this, and he said something that stuck with me. ‘This is your legacy’. We don’t just churn this stuff out – we see it as building up a body of work. We’ve both day jobs – we need to do this.”
And what a legacy it looks like becoming. Not content with a level of musicianship (honed on the trad folk and bluegrass circuit) way beyond most of their peers, Cat Malojian have an A-List gift for melody and shaded production that wouldn’t shame a Super Furry Animals or Lambchop record. Judging by the appearance of The Dawn Chorus so soon after Cat Malojian, they’ve also taken their work ethic from the greats.
“We want to record an album a year,” says Stevie. “And for every album to sound different from the previous one. Bands don’t seem to want to do that any more. They make a record every four years and tour the arse out of it. I can’t think of anything worse. All our heroes – Neil Young, The Beatles – they were writing and recording constantly and it’s one of the reasons I love them – you can see the progression. We’ve loads and loads of songs – why shouldn’t we put them out?”
Good as their word, The Dawn Chorus sounds very different to Cat Malojian. True, there are any number of absolute acoustic pearls (I point you in the direction of the gorgeous ‘The Mating Game’), but from the sun-blushed, open-topped opener ‘Where Do We Go’, to the beats and samples of ‘King Of The Quagmire’, there is ample evidence that Stevie and Johnny are more than chimney-corner balladeers.
Stevie laughs: “When we first started, I smoked a lot of grass and would get bombed and loop Johnny’s banjos through a sampler. We listened to loads of electronic stuff. But we had an idea for the first record, and there wasn’t a place for anything like that. It was no big deal, we’ll get round to it. We want to do a really stripped-back folk album too.”
The Dawn Chorus is another very special record from a very special band.
Perhaps, it’ll make us all wake up to the fact.