The Cat’s Miaow 
Once relegated to the lost wilds of indie pop’s past, the last few years have given the catalog of Aussie indie pop group The Cat’s Miaow a new life. The band’s early years found them mostly reeling out works via 7” and compilation appearances. They cropped up in quiet corners, sharing space on one release with Stereolab and rounding up collected singles on labels like The Bus Stop, Darla, and more recently, World of Echo. The latter is what’s brought them into the current view, catching up the curious over the past few years on their comps Songs ’94-’98 and Skipping Stones. The spotlight got the band back together for some reunion shows and from there they entered the studio, getting together an unlikely debut nearly 36 years after they began. The new album retains quite a bit of what’s endeared them over the years. It’s marked by their quaint, quiet delivery. Perhaps scrubbed up a bit from their early, homespun releases, but it never feels any less like a softly spun secret for lonely days, thoughtful wanders, and half-remembered dreams.
Strums swirl around a quiver of keys, threading through the band’s fragile tales of regret, loss, ennui, and ache. The bashfulness of youth has been replaced with the quiet resolve of age. The band’s still slipping in and out of a daydream haze, a soft-focus feeling that follows them from song to song, but that haze hides a truth behind its walls. That feeling was integral to their longstanding appeal, and its nice to see that the haze hasn’t burned off with age. Their debut wraps around the listener like down blanket, a comfort to quell the uncertainty at the heart of their lyrics. They’re here with you, through the doubt, fending off the anxious murmur that’s always in the background. It’s never too late to cement a legacy, and The Cat’s Miaow prove exactly why they’ve come swimming to the surface over the years. Lovely to have them back, even better to have When You Smiled And Turned Away added to their treasure trove of pasts singles.
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