OFFICIAL NOTICE
A new musical genre has emerged. It goes by the name “meowave” and originates from none other than the:
It is rare that I sit down to listen to the entire discography of an artist. It is even more rare in the modern age during which an endless abyss of music awaits at our fingertips. I had heard of meowave through the whisperings of Twitter. I wanted to discover what meowave is, and so I set out to listen to all six of Cat Temper’s albums. It was a worthwhile endeavor to delve into an artist’s body of work and giving the dedicated time reminded me of my natural love of music.
I set out to describe meowave using formal musicematics. Meowave could be given by the following equation:
meowave = synthwave + dark synth + dark wave + punk rock + metal + psychedelic rock +… cattitude2
What I discovered, however, was meowave is much greater than the sum of its parts.
Keep reading.
At its core meowave is inspired by the feline point of view, which Cat Temper told the electroscape when writing music is the “switching from cute and friendly to aggressive and erratic in a snap.” This feature of meowave is front and center on the June 2020 release, Curiosity Thrilled the Cat, which was written during the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdown.
Cat Temper told the electroscape he always works through difficult experiences by expressing himself through music, and his latest release is no exception, fueled by feelings of being “…trapped in a rut of mindless routines in claustrophobic spaces filled with ever-growing anxiety.” The artist said the album was made purely for catharsis and is genuinely surprised it has been received so positively, wondering if he might have struck a collective nerve.
Cat Temper’s Curiosity Thrilled the Cat is inspired, energetic, and purposeful. The album as described by the artist is “…blunt and repetitive like banging your head against a wall” and is packed full of “…melodies that are angular and awkward with sounds like grinding teeth and colliding thoughts.” I find these qualities ever-present in Cat Temper’s discography, reflecting a style the artist refers to as synthpunk in sound and attitude.
The opening track “Catnip Addict” impressed upon me the feeling of a circus led by the insane, playing like everything is suddenly spinning while I run up and down stairs heading in no direction, slide down ropes, and swim across waters, sometimes in fast motion, sometimes in slow motion.
This circus is the essence of the feline personality and is built from sounds including industrial guitar effects and metal-infused beats on “Black Meowgic,” “Fire Tiger,” and “Prowler,” big, chunky reverberating bass lines on “Rad Panther,” and digital synth melodies that zig-zag through zeros and ones on “Cry Lion.”
Curiosity Thrilled the Cat also showcases other building blocks of meowave. Cat Temper uses synth sounds to the fullest to elicit the powerful emotional and mental states only a sound can exert. Cat Temper told the electroscape he appreciates synth sounds as much as formal songs and that he “…noodles around to discover the personality of a synth sound and then looks for other voices to fit a musical conversation.”
These other voices highlight another building block of meowave, which is a dialectic quality of the music, as if two people are having a conversation, sometimes alternating turns, other times one speaking over the other, sometimes on a related topic, other times not. This dialectic quality stems from the switching characteristic of the feline personality, to be sure, but is amplified throughout Cat Temper’s albums by the artist’s exquisite use of minimalistic synth melodies, letting the effect do the work, often elevated above the rest of the sounds that constitute the music. These qualities can be heard in “Claws and Effect,” which as it comes to a close plays like the end to a story where a grim fate awaits.
Meowave plays like a short story, each built from a series of scenes, strengthening its power over our emotion and psychology and is prominent in “Prowler” which features the unexpected feline transition from friendly to fierce and the unfolding of a disjointed scene that is at one moment feverish and frantic and at another silent and contemplative.
These building blocks of meowave grew out of Cat Temper’s past work, beginning with Purring for Vengeance originally released in January 2019.
Purring for Vengeance highlights a budding integration of styles, including dark wave on “Afterburner” and synthpop in “First Bite.” The album exemplifies Cat Temper’s use of synth sounds, such as ghostly melodies on “Vector Blade,” the feline transitions from drama to future funk on “Fur and Fang”, and darksynth undertones on “New Wave Nights.”
The conversational element of meowave rears its head on “Hoverstate,” and begins to take center stage in the artist’s subsequent release in February 2019, Henry.
Henry is a mind-blowing electronic soundtrack to David Lynch’s first full length film released in 1977, Eraserhead. Cat Temper told the electroscape making the soundtrack “…fulfilled a decades-long desire to rescore my favorite David Lynch film. It was a huge lesson in breaking out of my usual writing habits and giving voice to the inner thoughts of characters through sound.” Henry comes with instructions for how to pair the music with the film, but it is a stand alone release.
Henry has a strong psychedelic quality that should not be understated and, at times, reminds me of early Pink Floyd, such as Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Close your eyes, turn off the lights, and push play and treat yourself to a sonic escape to the outer edges of the mind or put on headphones and take a walk and let the album be the soundtrack to your experience.
Henry is a giant leap forward in the emergence of meowave. It elicits strong imagery of watching imagined black-and-white scenes unfold. Cat Temper’s use of synth sounds to do the heavy lifting shine on Henry, giving rise to sensations such as a rat running on a wheel in the black cavity of the mind or the existential feeling of floating in space.
Henry is loyal to the heavier side of Cat Temper, featuring industrial distorted guitar effects and beats on “Man in the Planet,” digital textures on “Eraser Dust,” and quintessential dark synth melodies on “The Neighbor” and “Seduction.” The songs on Henry are built around incredible drama and the short story quality of meowave, as on “Sick”
Henry peaks in a set of psychologically tantalizing songs, where the song names and intensity are built to match, beginning with “Dark Thoughts,” “A Ghastly Decision,” “Regret,” “Everything is Fine”, and then finally, “At Last the End,” which feels a bit like watching yourself walk away knowing everything is not okay.
Cat Temper’s next album, Digital Soul, also has a soundtrack-like quality to it.
The album was released in April 2019 and is built around the concept of a computer chess program that develops self-awareness and faces off in a chess game with a human computer programmer who begins to question the nature of reality and begins to wonder whether the soul is nothing more than a digital file stored on the mainframe computer.
Digital Soul is nuanced and intricate and requires dedicated attention to fully appreciate how boldly and courageously it brings together an impressive number of musical styles to create an instrumental concept album. The album opens with “A Matter Time,” which sets the tone with synth melodies that flutter in and out of awareness. The album uses video game sounds and big bass lines on “Mechanical Turk,” minimalist synth melodies to create a conversational quality of meowave on “Look Deep Within,” creeping bass and synth lines on “A Small Wood Box,” and big, atmospheric dark and industrial synth on “Almost Human.”
On Digital Soul I first noticed Cat Temper sometimes constructs songs with very little or no support from dum lines. For example, on “Reflection Gate” or “Looking Into the Sun,” the songs are impressively built almost entirely from the synth.
Cat Temper said his signature sound gelled on the two subsequent releases, including Something Whiskered This Way Comes released in August 2019 and Feralyzed released in December 2019. The artist told the electroscape the albums were built from “more dynamic and tighter songwriting and wilder sound design. Those albums highlight my love of cheesy synths, 8-bit arcade game music, heavy distortion and synthetic drums.” The artist went on to say that “I feel like I finally figured out how to blend them into a cohesive whole, even though it probably sounds schizophrenic to anyone else!”
The song titles on Something Whiskered This Way Comes play on classic rock tunes, such as “Meow at the Devil,” “Purranoid,” and “Don’t Fur the Reaper.” Something Whiskered This Way Comes features more forwardly aggressive and higher tempo songs, and the punk rock side of the music begins to come into focus. It brings in new elements less noticeable on previous releases, such as funky bass lines and masterful use of minimalistic sounds that let the synth lead the melody, such as in in “Calicommando.” There are light beats, punk rock bass lines, and even a hint of funk all on “Purranoid,” dark wave, synthpop, and video game sound effects on “Master of Pawprints,” and the dialectic quality is salient on “Don’t Fur the Reaper.” The feline personality is prominent on “Tomcat Sawyer,” eliciting images of a miniature man running through a giant maze one moment and under the control of a puppeteer the next.
The opening track on Feralyzed – “Ace of Spays” – features ‘80s punk bass lines, conversational synth melodies, dark wave, as well as the now familiar Cat Temper circus. Feralyzed has the short story quality so characteristic of meowave on “Careless Whisker’ and “Should I Stray or Should I Go,” as well as digital melodies, distorted, energetic guitar effects, and rich percussion in “When Puss Comes to Shove,” “Bad Cattitude,” and “Scratch Me When I Fall.” “The Unfurgiven” brings all the pieces of meowave together in one place, and highlights Cat Temper’s capacity to squeeze all the juice from synth sounds.
Cat Temper often releases music on formats other than digital, including vinyl. Cat Temper told the electroscape his personal collection has grown to about 1,500 records, and he is motivated to record and release his own physical albums, especially on vinyl with the big cover artwork. Synthwave fans are especially excited by the physical formats and have supported Cat Temper’s effort to release music on them.
Cat Temper is looking forward to sharing a new collection of songs featuring vocalists from various styles singing cat-themed lyrics – naturally – which will be a break from the instrumental music the artist has released to date.