- I feel like I’ve started a few reviews saying “it’s been a big few years for [insert band name here]”. For Tassie post-punks The Native Cats, it’s almost certainly worth dragging the tired phrase out again, because they have been genuinely big years, although, yes, well, it’s actually been four since their last album.
Both of the band’s members have been off in other outfits, pursuing solo projects and in bassist Julian Teakle’s case, record labels, even while he’s been living in other humid climes, including East Timor and Myanmar. The biggest upheavals though, belong to frontwoman Chloe Alison Escott. Escott read a novel of trans discovery called Nevada, was catapulted into a gender crisis, came out, transitioned and then, as you might understand, decided to go back and re-do a lot of the material on John Sharp Toro so that it reflected her brand new headspace.
What does that new place sound like? One thing is without doubt: this is an energised version of the Native Cats. The most obvious reason for that is Chloe herself: she sounds charged up in a way that she rarely has before. The band have long professed a debt to the punchy, glowering misanthropy of Mark E. Smith and The Fall and you can certainly hear that here. However I also get some of the glammily avant-garde, self-possessed, punk delivery of Kirin J. Callinan, although I’m not quite sure what people think of making that connection right now. It took me a while to work out what it was but I reckon there’s also flashes of The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle. If there’s a connection to be made between all three it’s in a furious version of balladry: roaring, emotional journeys. It’s the sort of stuff that is thunderously self-affirming even as it shakes the listener to the core. That sounds exactly like what Chloe’s trying to put across.
She lunges for that honesty, but of all these artists, even here, at her most open and direct she’s quite oblique. John Sharp Toro might be an album of self-expression and personal discovery but Chloe doesn’t feel at all pressured to explain the details. Instead she filters her own feelings through obscure references purloined from books she’s read recently and leaves them here in undigested chunks. If you want to understand the title of the album, for instance, you’ll have to hunt down the 1937 book Serenade by James M. Cain and work out why Chloe borrowed the name of the narrator John Sharp and appended the word ‘toro’ to it. I read a synopsis and apparently Sharp steals a bullfighter’s prostitute girlfriend, so, there’s somewhere for you to start. I think it’s got something to do with him embodying the spirit of the bull: “I’m all toro / At every frequency I’m all toro / Tally up my cages I’m all toro / Men’s hands roll off me like water, I’m all toro.” A new strength, power, freedom, still hunted, persecuted, but watch out, I’m here now. Hey I think I’m getting it! Only took me forty-five minutes.
Other elements of the album contribute directly without any reservation. Julian Teakle went through his own watershed, reading The Big Midweek: the autobiography of The Fall’s bassist Steve Hanley. No more Peter Hook basslines for Julian, it’s all Hanley now. They’re certainly owning the gutsiness of post-punk, although … some of them still sound plenty groovy enough for Hook. Additionally all the drumming on the record comes from New York based Sarah Hennies, imparting a more visceral quality than the drum machine the Native Cats work with live.
If the last things Native Cats-ish that you heard was Escott’s comparatively meditative solo record, The Long O, then John Sharp Toro will be a rather electrifying return to the fold. It’s the angular, skeletal, dissonant sound of The Native Cats, it’s also a roaring, emotive journey of self-discovery and it’s unashamedly a complex, difficult puzzle to solve. It’s been a big time for The Native Cats lately and John Sharp Toro reflects every bit of it.
- Chris Cobcroft.