One diamond at a time

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This article was published 11/03/2019 (2414 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For the eight months prior to the February release of their new album, Stolen Diamonds, genre-bending Australian six-piece group the Cat Empire dropped one track a month, each of which also featured the work of an Australian photographer.

It was a slow but effective rollout, with fans champing at the bit each month to get another taste of what the band had created on their seventh full-length record.

All 13 tracks are now out in the world, and so is the Cat Empire, who have embarked on a massive worldwide tour that lands in Winnipeg Tuesday night at the Burton Cummings Theatre.

Frontman and lead vocalist Felix Riebl spoke to the Free Press last week about the Stolen Diamonds and how the band continues to merge their eclectic musical influences nearly 20 years into their career.

Free Press: The new album has only been out for a few weeks, but what has the response to the new songs been like from fans in a live setting?

 

Felix Riebl: Very positive. I’ve taken the time to spend a bit of time after shows chatting to fans and the overwhelming response has been great. I mean I know that’s what most musicians say when they release an album, you can believe me or not, but for a band like us, I feel like there were times when we made albums that were more heady, studio albums and they always sounded good but they were quite difficult to bring to the stage and it felt like a lot more work.

Whereas I think we made an unspoken commitment for the last two or three albums, although they’re very different, but there was a commitment to say we want to make songs that will play themselves and a make our lives easier on tour. Because when the song can do the work for you, it’s great because you can kind of relax into it and let the more improvisational sections or the unexpected sections be the part you really express yourself in.

FP: Do you find it’s easier, then, to be more in the moment, rather than thinking about the next track or a hard part coming up or whatever else?

 

FR: Yeah, exactly. It means you can kind of be there to enjoy it, allow it to flow over you more. And look, I don’t have a great singing voice at the best of times, I’ve always been a fairly expressive type of songwriter in so far as I’ve used the faults and even weaknesses in my voice to write, too, so stylistically that’s how it’s worked for me and I don’t mind that.

But it just means when you have a lot of people singing back at you, it really helps you sing in tune (laughs). You know there’s this thing that happens when a lot of people sing together it balances out the note, so there’s this really perfect melody coming back at you when 1,000 people are singing something, so basically I’ve tried to write songs that are going to balance the very shifty pitch of my voice.

 

FP: Has the official release of this album felt any different given the fact you’ve been doing this slow release of singles for months now?

 

FR: Yeah, I guess it was. I mean the music landscape has changed so dramatically since the release of our first album, which was very much still in the physical world, in those days you would ship out crates and crates of albums.

And we still do a bit of that; I think, comparatively, we have a fairly committed fanbase that wants to buy physical stuff too, but we’ve entered into a new sphere and that’s a lot of people streaming music and a lot of cross-media and cross-artistic mediums. So we worked with several photographers and released a song a month for eight months… Basically it was a way of having our cake and eating it, too, because we get to stretch out the album and then also have an album release date.

FP: Did it feel… I’m not sure if anti-climactic is the right word, but did the actual album-release day feel different knowing you had more than half the album out in the world already?

 

FR: No, not at all. Nothing feels anti-climactic when you’re doing a big show… there’s something about the release of the whole album which is something we pride ourselves on.

I mean, I guess it’s not that totally unexpected thing you get when you don’t hear anything except one song on the radio and then you hear the album, but no, for us, so much of what we’ve done as a band is based around the atmosphere and we have tours coming up and we’ve had, like I said, a really exciting lead up time, it’s felt like we’ve had eight singles, and then the album itself hopefully still serves that purpose of getting into people’s walls and being a whole body of work with an arc to it.

FP: I read that Stolen Diamonds is kind of like the final chapter of a trilogy that includes the previous two records, Steal the Light and Rising With the Sun. Other than working with the same producer for all three — Jan Skubiszewski — what other qualities do you feel links these records to one another?

 

FR: I should clarify that’s something that I said and that’s by no means being validated by the rest of the band. I say that because I feel like when we did Steal the Light, which would be the first part of that trilogy when we started working with Jan Skubiszewski, we reached a point again where the band — and this was quite an unspoken thing — but we said we wanted to make the Cat Empire be that really euphoric night out. And I don’t mean that in the sense that people might dance or go to a festival, I mean in the sense of that really dynamic experience that only people who have followed the Cat Empire and have been to the shows really know what I’m talking about. It’s not a musical or stylistic thing, there’s not a formula to it, it’s just an intent.

And I guess that played out in the studio to say let’s throw everything into these albums, let’s make the choruses as big as we can, let’s really layer it, let’s be excessive, let’s try and challenge ourselves musically. And I think we had that intent for the last three albums and working with Jan Skubiszewski, there were various qualities that crept into that, or approaches, even though those three albums are quite different, they all have that unspoken intent behind them.

FP: How important is cohesion to you? Because you pull from so many genres and global influences, but I feel like your albums always have a decent flow to them. How do you accomplish that?

 

FR: Well you try not to look too closely between one song and the next. It’s a series of contrasts that are smashed up against each other, that’s the best way I can describe this band. There are a lot of different… you could break it down and say there are a lot of stylistic influences and we’re all very different musicians and have very different tastes in music and have brought a lot of those to various elements of it, but the atmosphere of the Cat Empire overall is a combination of those contrasts thrown together and somehow after all these years of playing it has made a mysteriously identifiable sound. I can’t describe it.

I really hate it when I do media and they use genre terms to describe my music, and I don’t really like that because I think the band is all about the atmosphere. Then again, I end up just sounding really wishy-washy when I try to describe it myself (laughs). So basically I try not to do that too much and just say there is something amongst us that works but it’s just a series of contrasts crush against each other and hopefully it’s a dynamic result.

erin.lebar@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @NireRabel