CAT’S Eyes are supposed to stand out, but this album could easily have slipped by unnoticed. It turns out to the lovingly crafted work of one Rachel Zeffira, a Canadian opera singer and multi-instrumentalist now living in London, and Faris Badwin, the singer from British psychedelic rockers The Horrors.
Meeting in 2009, he sent her a compilation of his favourite tunes, she sent him demos of her songs, and together they forged an album rooted in a shared crush on girl groups of the early Sixties: The Crystals, The Ronettes, The Shangri-Las, those trouble-in-love purveyors of what Brian Wilson called “teenage symphonies”.
Throw in a production that echoes bonkers Brit Joe Meek and American wall of sound builder Phil Spector, and Cat’s Eyes is classic pop yet avant-garde, dated but now. If Marc Almond’s Marc And The Mambas was once your gothic poison, then Cat’s Eyes is the new bee’s knees.
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