The Cat Empire release a new album for a new era

The new lineup of The Cat Empire have come of age with the release of their new album, Where The Angels Fall, out on Friday, August 25. BOB GORDON heard from the band’s singer/songwriter/co-founder, Felix Riebl to find out what’s changed, and what hasn’t, in this new era of one of Australia’s most loved bands.

Your new album, Where The Angels Fall, is out this week. An album release is always a big deal, but given this is the first album from the new iteration of The Cat Empire, how does that feel?

It feels very special. I’ve got to say of all the albums that I’ve been involved in, this is going to be right up there with the most special to me for a number of reasons. I mean, the sense of relief and excitement to take the band into a new era and have all these new, fresh personalities on there and just for that to feel as musically alive and vibrant as this album does to me.

Also, the fact that it really came out of a bleak time in the industry and we wanted The Cat Empire, with an album and the tour surrounding it, to be there on the on the other side of the past three or four years and to have an album that feels like it’s of Melbourne and have a huge number of musicians involved and dedicated to playing live. So in that sense, it’s special too.

And also, for personal reasons, this album came out of a very, very difficult time in my life as my little brother Max passed away. He was very, very involved with the band. He came up with the name for the band as an eight-year-old kid and also performed with us at the Albert Hall and was part of recordings and things like that. For music to play some part in working in a space that was otherwise impossible, this album represents all of that for me. So Where The Angels Fall I think, is my favourite album I’ve ever been involved in.

Does it feel like another, new debut album, in a way?

Absolutely. That’s exactly how we’re looking at it. It’s funny because people have been saying it’s our ninth studio album which feels like an awful lot, but it really feels like this is the first album… it has that sort of excitement to it. It’s like, ‘what are you going to do with your sound?’ And the questions about what the spirit of a band is, even with new personalities, was a big one for us. How do we do something that has the spirit of The Cat Empire, that is really true to what this band does and celebrates at its best? And I really think we achieved that with this album.

It has, like I said, a huge number of musicians performing live from a real variety of backgrounds and styles and from the first day to the last it was just an incredibly moving and exciting album to be a part of. It was larger than life for us and in the midst of all that I really feel like the soul of the band is true. So to realise that – because you never know these things until you actually live them – to come out the other side and realise that, is fantastic.

So overall, there’s 75 musicians in total featured across the album. Would this have been the most exhaustive recording experience for the band?

(Laughs) I don’t think exhaustive is the right word. It’s certainly the most we’ve ever packed into an album in terms of sheer number of musicians and from an intent where instead of starting every song just with the rhythm section, it would be started with, say a Brazilian, street percussion ensemble and with some the beginning point was some West African percussionists that we had in, and others the real linchpin was like a symphonic string section and things like that.

So I feel like each song was kind of a world to itself, but it was by no means exhaustive. We worked around the clock with Andy Baldwin (longtime producer), and that’s part of the reason why I love working with him. He’s got the same kind of energy levels that I do. Same with Ollie (McGill, band co-founder) really, and we’d work from 10 in the morning until 2am for over a month straight pretty much and felt lively every morning when we showed up again. So it was a very intense recording experience, but it wasn’t exhaustive. It was pretty enlivening, actually.

I spoke to Grace Barbe (now on bass and backing vocals) who said that from rehearsal to recording to touring that joining The Cat Empire had been full on, but she’d loved every minute of it. What was it like for you recruiting the new members then taking them through both old songs and new?

It was huge, especially because we’d toured for a good part of 20 years with the original lineup of the band. So naturally there’s a sort of a comfort that happens with musicians who you’ve grown up with and you kind of know that it’s going to click. There was something very, very exciting about the touring side, because the shows we’re doing with this tour that’s upcoming, it’s very much a classic Cat Empire set as well.

We’re going to play new material in there, but there’s so many songs that people have experienced and want to have come to life in a live setting. And there are unknowns there, like, ‘how’s this going to work?’ and an excitement and sort of nerves that you don’t have unless you’ve actually got skin in the game, and you’ve actually got a level of risk that you’re taking.

So Grace, who’s singing songs, she’s singing in Seychelles creole, she’s playing bass, she’s dancing. She’s an extraordinary performer, but she had a big learning curve in terms of inheriting those basslines, making them her own. She’s got a lot to think about for a show and like I said before, about keeping the soul of the band alive.

For me keeping the spirit of a collective like the Cat Empire alive isn’t about trying to replace things like for like or trying to think about how this member is going to do what that one does, it’s actually trying to say, ‘how do you play to the strengths of these new members?’ So someone like Lazaro Numa, is a Cuban-born trumpet player, amazing sound, but also a very handy percussionist, and great singer. It’s like, ‘okay, how do we bring that great Cuban fire and energy into this new lineup?’

Same with Grace. She’s an extraordinary performer in her own right and brings a whole wealth of musical knowledge from the Seychelles side of things, and that’s something we really wanted to embrace.

You mentioned before the tragedy of your little brother passing away. On the album there’s the songs Be With You Again and Coming Back Again, that I just wanted to touch on because they seem to be reflections on grief, but also the joy of memories… 

They were very, very moving songs to be part of. I remember being in the studio, tears running down my cheeks, as I’m singing those takes. Tears are funny because in grief they can be a relief of sorts. I’m not afraid of tears, it’s something that that travels with you, but I remember being in the studio recording Be With You Again – which is a very direct dedication to my brother – and it’s funny, in the process of making music, I feel that I can be close to the spirit world.

I don’t mean that even in an overtly dramatic way, only insofar as when I was recording in there with headphones on my head and a microphone in front of me, as I was listening to the band perform and doing live vocal takes for these songs, it was as if I could tap into the sense of humour or the eyebrow raise or those nuances you know about a person you’re so close to. You can access them, access that spirit, that personality that you miss so much in the process of making music.

My own experience of grief hasn’t been that I can look at a photo and remember that person, it almost feels more removed because there’s a detach there for me. But either performing shows or recording music, I’ve felt as if I could be close with my younger brother Max and that was very, very special for me to experience in that awful time.

On social media the pictures and clips from the European tour looked amazing, with full-houses and clearly exuberant audiences. In speaking to a lot of musicians since the pandemic era quite a few have said they thought that kind of experience would never return…

Never return? Absolutely. That rings true. I think we all felt that way as musicians. There was just a lot of uncertainty about ‘will it come back again, what will it look like?’ So I imagine that I’m part of a much broader community of musicians who have had this experience in one way or another.

That first show in Europe, I think it was Madrid, from the first note of being there seeing a full house having that energy we get from Spanish audiences, with a new band behind me, who were doing what I thought was actual justice to what The Cat Empire is, what it represents, what it should do to a room of people. The drummer has to count in four to the first note and there was a wash of relief and of something close to euphoria and that feeling lasted for a very long time.

It’s gone into the into the space of realising how precious it is to be able to go there because once you’ve doubted whether it will come back and what it will look like, and then you can have a moment like that you appreciate it very, very much.

I really agree with what you said and what you’ve heard from other musicians. It’s certainly been my experience as well.