It’s out of fashion at the moment, but there are advantages to separating the art from the artist. Not exactly so we can all keep listening to our favorite fascists and abusers (though every time I read the lyrics to Kid Rock’s “Bawitdaba,” I shed a single tear, mourning what might have been, had that singer not decided to forgo empathy for a career of hackish cruelty), but more that there’s something to be said for being able to step outside the art, if only to admire all the angles. On the Native Cats’ 2020 single “Run With the Roses,” Chloe Alison Escott sang, “I felt my body happening/To people on the street,” signaling that, for some artists and humans, a reliable narration is outside their control. Like all the greats (poetry, Christianity, Starship Troopers, etc.), the Native Cats are as much fun to misunderstand as they are to get nearly right. The post-punk duo of Escott and Julian Teakle—from Hobart, Tasmania, Australia—have, since their debut LP, 2009’s Always On, been operating outside of post-punk’s glass house; like that cartoon meme of the sicko drooling “Yes... Hahaha... Yes!” in the window of a House of Jealous Lovers. In fact, on that very debut, the Native Cats have a song called “Game of Numbers” that opens with Escott intoning, “If I step back any further/I’d be in the house next door,” where the intent is to express her ambivalence regarding a certain kind of scrawny-tuff post-punk anti-(but not really)machismo. Of course, in the hands of an expert on ambivalence such as the Native Cats’ singer, the song works just as well as a threat as it does as commentary; with the Native Cats martyring themselves as authors every time they record a note.
Since their debut, running through three ensuing long players and a handful of 7-inches, they’ve been doing their damnedest to avoid perfecting their sound. Or at least the sound that others heard. While there are few types more lazy than your average post-punk music critic (hours spent with the lyrics of Mark E. Smith inevitably lead to a spiritual malaise where the writers essentially throw up their hands and mutter, “I’ll just take your word for it”), critics seemed particularly eager to pigeonhole the Native Cats as either neo-Sprechgesang Albini-acs or desperate DIY bicyclists. Even as the duo said, again and again in interviews, that they were more interested in the effervescent space pop of bands like Broadcast than they were in re-creating the vein-bulging sounds of indie Chicago or industrial England. The misunderstandings are forgivable, however, considering the Native Cats’ talent for regularly accomplishing the highest goal of all post-punk: making the listener want to take up smoking and lose their virginity to someone with bad skin. And it’s not like anyone meant “cool as hell” as an insult.
Anyway, after initial comparisons to such bands as Young Marble Giants (the Welsh aggro-twee minimalists who, as is so often the case, the Native Cats had not yet heard a lick of), Escott and Teakle did only so much to correct that misapprehension. Rather, they doubled and tripled down on the bass-driven melodies, using synths and melodicas as cascading flourishes—like Einstürzende Neubauten use canisters of ball bearings on sheet metal—while adding subtle Madchester touches and increasingly letting Escott’s open-heart exploration of her own voice (in both the vocal cord and vocal worldview sense) offset the economy—bordering on austerity—of the duo’s songwriting. If the duo never quite made their fondness for Broadcast as apparent as maybe they’d have liked, they created a singular enough catalog to, if not reverse time and influence Young Marble Giants, then at least allow for the possibility of some sort of Michael J. Fox-esque time traveler showing up at a Cardiff prom in 1978 to really blow the minds of the collected colossal youths.
