Brand New Independent Label MoFi Records To Release Peter Cat's Debut LP "The Saccharine Underground"

"MoFi Record Label is a brand new DIY indie project co-founded by Montrose-based musician William Codona and Neil McLeod, proprietor of Mo’ Fidelity record shop. The ethos is to put the artist and their music first and provide a vehicle for bands and solo artists from across Scotland to get physical copies of their recorded work pressed and distributed in independent record shops. The label is run on a not-for-profit basis (and hopefully a not-for-loss basis) with funds accrued by the label being ploughed back in to fund future releases. We believe there has never been a richer, more diverse selection of great Scottish independent music and fertile ground for even more getting their voices heard and their songs out there. We aim to emulate in some small way the models successfully adopted by labels like Lost Map and Last Night From Glasgow.”

On the debut LP from Glasgow-based artist Graham Neil Gillespie, otherwise known as Peter Cat, the observational songwriting spirit of Jarvis Cocker, Neil Hannon and Stephin Merritt is summoned with aplomb across ten tracks of sharp, gorgeously ornamental pop, rock and electro.

 

Recorded over a two-year period at Glasgow’s Green Door Studios, and mixed by production wunderkind Chris McCrory of Catholic Action, The Saccharine Underground is a sonically ambitious first album, tossing together post-punk, glam rock, baroque pop and synth-pop into a swirling forty-minute cabaret in which genres and viewpoints are taken on and off like costumes and wigs. While no one musical style predominates, the record is undergirded by the consistency of Gillespie’s arch and nostalgic vocal, with its shades of Bowie, Scott Walker and Lee Hazlewood, as well as an audiophiles’s staunch commitment to the analogue form (all songs were recorded to tape, and no digital instrumentation whatsoever was used).

 

The name The Saccharine Underground invokes the genre of baroque pop prevalent in the American pop music of late 1960s and early 70s, otherwise described as ‘cowboy psychedelia’. The title sums up the contradiction in terms that lies at the heart of the record: a melodic and textural sweetness, pleasantly familiar almost to the point of excess, is yoked into the service of a wry, dry songwriting, stacked full of conspicuously awkward and occasionally awful characters who repeatedly fall foul of themselves, others, and the world around them. Like a coffee sweetener dissolving on a rough, hungover tongue, the glossy surface of these songs masks a painful (and more truthful) core. The Saccharine Underground asks the listener whether they, in our online age of infallible virtuousness and the perpetual projection of perfection, may have more in common with these failures and their foibles than they may care to admit.

 

Case in point: on ‘ASMR’, which recalls Roxy Music at their giddy, whirling best, a funky brass motif evokes the impulse to get up and dance while a pitiable narrator decides to forgo human contact entirely in favour of staying in with a pair of high-quality headphones, getting all the sensual sustenance they need by watching one of YouTube’s many auto-meridian-sensory-response videos. And while woozy torch-song ‘Disappointing Lover’ boasts perhaps the record’s stand-out singalong chorus, reading between the lyrical lines reveals that this lover proves such a disappointment to his partner because, to coin a euphemism, he’s always too early ‘arriving at the station.’ 

 

This sardonic humour is a hallmark of the album, but it’s never overused, and always deployed subtly to encourage deeper rumination on the subject matter. ‘SO STR8’ is a downbeat electro-pop banger sung from the perspective of a teenager at a religious high school, struggling to come to terms with their sexual orientation while facing pressure from overbearing parents, partner and establishment to conform to what’s expected of them. It’s a  painful and traumatic subject, treated here with an unusual empathy for what is otherwise a feelgood, Pet Shop Boys-esque synth jam. And on spartan piano ballad ‘The Day After The Funeral’, this record’s emotional cornerstone, there’s no punchline at all: only a stark meditation not on grief itself, but on the utter disconnection felt by someone realising they don’t know how to really grieve the dead at all.

 

Listening to The Saccharine Underground, it’s clear why Peter Cat has already come in for the praise he has: touted as one to watch in the music pages of national newspaper The Scotsman, who praised an "intriguing blend of up-beat, art-school, glam-rock pop songs with catchy choruses and a fun sense of humour,” early singles and liver performances have also been lauded by The Morning Star ("reminiscent of early Scott Walker"), indie music blogger Nialler9 (“insanely good melody and excellent songcraft"), and scores of others. With so many other things so uncertain at this point in time, it’s nice to have something you can be sure of: that this is just the beginning of a long, fruitful and stubbornly unconventional career for Peter Cat.

 

Track listing:

1.The Big House (03:49)

2.Hand Through Hair (03:31)

3.Disappointing Lover (04:16)

4.(I Want To Break Down) In Your Arms (03:50)

5.ASMR (03:48)

6.If You Can’t Live Without Me (02:38)

7.Love Lurks (03:21)

8.The Day After The Funeral (04:44)

9.SO STR8 (04:13)

10.Planet Perfecto (07:56)