Saucy Monky - Turbulence

Every once in a while, a band comes out of left-field with a record that announces their presence as major contenders in stunningly positive terms. After you’ve caught your breath and taken it all in, the feeling that you’re dealing with the real thing becomes irresistible. But you go back to take another listen anyway, to see if maybe you’ve been jumping wrongly to conclusions – only to have your breath taken away again and again, as the record confounds your doubts by growing steadily in stature and resonance...
Turbulence, the debut album proper from Saucy Monky, is one of those records. It is at once rich, smart, sexy, thrilling, entertaining, diverse and hugely accomplished. It is a great, rock’n’roll record, both playful and deep, its sometimes dark indie heart-core spangled with enough sparks of pop magic to light up the western sky.
The SM sound fits into no genre or school. Rather, with Turbulence, they effectively set out their stall as a one-of-a-kind phenomenon. There are moments that will remind you of The Pretenders, others that may recall Belly or Elastica – and a precious few that evoke the more rootsy gifts of the likes of Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris or even the ghost of Janis Joplin.
There are elements of ‘90s girlie Britpop, in the feistiness and musical exuberance of ‘Good Day Down’; of Kate Bush-like tenderness in the intimacies and shoo-be-do-do-dos of ‘Bright Side’; of a punked-up Shangri-Las in the high school cheerleader vocals of ‘Boyz’; and of NY singer-songwriter story-telling confessionals in the langorous and lovely ‘Spark’. But that we can talk in terms of antecedents as diverse as these is just a measure of the musical vision that Turbulence gradually and triumphantly unveils.
As anyone familiar with the Saucy gestalt will know, the band are driven from the front by the combined talents of Annmarie Cullen from Dublin and Cynthia Catania from New Jersey. In hooking up together – and bringing on board two superb supporting musicians in bassist and multi-instrumentalist, Carson Cohen, and drummer Adam Marcello – the two singers have deftly avoided one major potential pitfall at least. With solo artists, too often even fine songwriting and vocal skills can be stretched threadbare over an entire album. Here the spotlight and the work are shared in a way that allows both individuals to shine all the more brightly. What’s more, there’s a subtle dynamic involved, with the voices and the styles of Ms. A and Ms. C interchanging and overlapping, so that a game of musical hide-and-seek develops, adding considerably to the intrigue: is that Annmarie or Cynthia? Which of them wrote that song, that line? Whose diary are we reading from now?
There is real musical chemistry at work here too, in the unison vocals, in the harmonies that soar, and in the call and response routines that suggest that they’d swap roles at the drop of Cynthia’s straw hat. But there is sexual chemistry also in the way they play off each other and in the palpable feeling of abandon, when they go for it together on a full-throated chorus. Inevitably, the boys – the Bs caught between A and C, as it were – will lean towards one favourite or another. So at least will some of the girls. But that is all part of the attraction. The scales here are evenly balanced, every which way that matters.
Fundamentally, Turbulence is a pop record in the sense that the Rolling Stones, Blondie or Aimee Mann might be said to make pop records – but it is, by turns, stylistically diverse, raw, musically sophisticated, passionate, honest, proud and seductive.
The lead single, a cover of Divinyls ‘I Touch Myself’ that’s as catchy as sin, has been gaining massive radioplay and it’s brought the band their first chart recognition – but it is intended as a come-on, a frolic before the serious business begins. And so it does with an exultant whoop, the opening track, ‘Good Day Down’, firing from the blocks – a blast of defiant indie rock with a bright, upbeat, chorus. But it’s the arrangement that seals the deal: the stray guitar squalls that murk up the mix, the floating ‘oh, oh, oh’ that provides a pause, the staccato section that builds the intensity, and then the driving repetition of “leave it” where A and C swap the song’s primary hook with rising insistence and conviction.
The whole record reflects this kind of assurance. There’s a west coast lightness to ‘Umbrellas’, all Major 7ths and sunny day promises, as Cynthia turns sexual predator opening with line “You know, I’m coming for ya, coming for ya” – a sweet threat if ever there was one. The production on ‘Bright Side’ gives the feel of a hand held close-up, Annmarie confessing “I’m so allured to the dark side/Better change my point of view”, whispering sensually in your ear as incidental sounds crowd the foreground, adding a gulp of intimacy.
The rhythm of the record is striking – between some tracks there is barely time to catch breath, between others there’s a full on pause and elsewhere again intriguing atmospherics link the songs. This is a serious album, in other words, rather than a collection of tracks. If anything the biggest challenge is hearing the first three – covering as they do a vast musical span in little more than the blink of an eye – back to back for the first time. But by the third spin, and with the breadth of the album having revealed itself, the flow feels just right.
Highlights abound. ‘Everybody Wants Something More’ opens with the immortal lines “You should kick me out/You should kick me out/You should lock me up/Before I take off my clothes”. A song about restlessness and yearning for what’s just out of reach, with breathtakingly lovely fills from Carson on the mandolin, it boasts an almost Fleetwood Mac-ish, radio-friendly chorus, but the edges are never so smooth as to obliterate the anguish that lies at the song’s centre.
Somebody, Annmarie I suspect, has a thing about numbers – always a hook worth dangling in a pop song. One of the standouts on the band’s 2003 mini-album Celebrity Trash was ‘Seven Days’ and the trick is repeated here on ‘Speedball’ which counts down – “5-4-Threeeee-2-1” – into an addictive chorus about the need for gratification, presumably of a sexual kind: “Hey, won’t you give me just a quick fix/Like a cheap trick/Like a sugar hit”.
The lyrics throughout are thoughtfully crafted, with an apparent simplicity that belies their rigour. “But I wear my costume/They’ll never guess/I’ll be Pinnochio in fancy dress,” Annmarie sings in ‘Solid Ground’, about the gloss that we try to paint over unrequited love. ‘Slow Motion’, on the same theme, wouldn’t sound out of place on Emmylou’s Wrecking Ball album, with its insistent bass and banjo colourings, but the undercurrent here is of sexual jealousy: “You wanted some space/So I gave you some space/Is the space you were talking about/someone else’s bedroom?”
‘Spark’ is an especially heartfelt and evocative torch song and Cynthia turns in a wonderful, spine-tingling, virtuoso vocal performance. And ‘Everyday Lover’ – “I may not be the prettiest girl,” Cynthia sighs – is a slice of Stonesey white soul, on which C exercises her glorious falsetto, that could become an anthem for mistresses the world over.
‘Pink Flamingo’ – it opens with a great, fat, fuzzy almost sax-like guitar riff – is another sexually ambivalent gem. Three quarters of the way in, there is a moment of production nous that typifies the chutzpah with which the record is put together: the instrumentation is stripped back to a distorted guitar strum, and the backing vocals take on an ethereal glow, the entire finally pausing before the key shifts dramatically for a final flag-waving chorus. A great sense of dynamics makes for great pop music, and listening to this, you know that it will work like a dream on a big stage.
That’s where Saucy Monky deserve to be. They may be indie kids at heart but they have the moves and the melodies to woo major audiences. Turbulence shows the swagger and the bottle of real rockers. But it also has the emotional range, musical fearlessness and personal conviction to make it wonderfully and widely accessible.
Turbulence is an independent release. It might help if Saucy Monky had a major machine behind them, but they’re at the controls now and thoroughly ready for action. Wherever the trip takes them, they’ve made a record that they’ll look back on in their dotage as the one with which they finally took off. Fasten your safety-belts…