PLEASE Please You concert booker Joe Coates has even better taste buds than Mary Berry.
Time after time, he brings his new discoveries to York’s underworld, sometimes Leeds too, and you leave wishing you had his record collection.
As chance would have it, Tigercats’ second album, Mysteries, had dropped unannounced into Press Towers, and from lead-off track Junior Champion, your reviewer was as hooked as a cat’s claw on a jumper.
The East London quintet’s principal songwriter, Duncan Barrett, liked the album title for its suggestion of depths beneath the surface yet the real clue to Tigercats lies in that band moniker.
Songs can start off like cats but last Saturday, plenty turn into tigers by the finale in a prowl-to-growl transition from keyboard-sweetened indie-pop to scuzzy, cat-scratch guitar rock, hence the comparisons to Postcard label-era Orange Juice and cult critics’ darlings Hefner.
Tigercats’ ace calling card is the bewitching, switching vocals of guitarist Barrett and keyboard player Laura Kovic, typified by the blissful Sleeping In The Backseat and spiky agitation of Wheezer, while Kovic glides into the dreamy terrain of Camera Obscura’s languid laments in Laura and Cesar.
Barrett and his bassist brother Giles both perform with their feet bare and, yes, they still have toes, not claws.
For now.
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