EP Review: Wild Cat Strike – Mustard Coloured Years

You know that guy at the party, the mild-mannered one with the notebook and the messenger bag that you think may have been someone’s boyfriend once but you’re not sure? That’s Brighton four-piece Wild Cat Strike: out of the mainstream but not quite obtuse enough to be fatally socially awkward. Mustard Coloured Years is, however, an awkward document. It’s almost as if the songwriting process filters out the obvious, the overly cheesy, and constructs and arranges the song in fragments. It’s very like the bold portrait that, on close examination, is composed of thousands of details smaller pictures. Mustard Coloured Years is like that. It is sonic and lyrical fragments crafted into songs.

Opening track Mustard begins as a wistful and sparkling mid-tempo waltz. As it grows, it develops layers of analogue keyboards before building into a grinding coil and then dropping back into a fantasy fairground tune. The slightly off-kilter vocal adds to the overall sense that while beautiful, not everything is quite right. The two parts of Toothcutter combine to make a cinematic soundscape that ebbs and flows, sometimes lazy river, sometimes babbling brook. Swamp is a swelling slow sail with its own eddies and tempo changes. Beekeeper Song, at 1:13, is as neat an exposition of Wild Cat Strike‘s methodology as you would ever need, capturing that quirky wistfulness that pervades the whole EP.

Wild Cat Strike might possibly be too clever for their own good. The lyrical and instrumental dexterity means that this is head music. It took me several listens to get this, to get past the oddity of the arrangements and the forlorn and occasionally off-key vocal. Head music it may be, but it’s clearly heartfelt and personal, and not in a sixth form bad poetry way, even if its forlorn narratives and observations are not immediately obvious. As a piece, it’s a growing pleasure that defies the knee-jerk reaction. I wonder if anyone has time to listen anymore in these days of instant gratification. Mustard Coloured Years is definitely one you have to listen to. To do any less would be to cheat the band. Often mesmeric, often beautiful and definitely not skin-deep.

Mustard Coloured Years is out now on Small Pond Records