Composed of Adam Forkner (White Rainbow), Honey Owens (Valet), and Eva Salens (Inca Ore), We Like Cats have all the right ideas to construct mind-melting, starkly innovative music. Their debut Proper Eats is an album dedicated to — yep, you guessed it — cats, with Owens mouthing such curiosities as “Cats are hungry and want some pineapple meat” and “We like the cats that can slam dunk.” While they draw influences from avant jam rock and dub reggae — sonics somewhat equivalent to a well-baked Sun Araw — it’s clear they aren’t taking themselves seriously: the community of artists constructing similar jams are often swathed in murky mystique and deadly seriousness, but We Like Cats are the refreshing tongue-in-cheek riposte to this stony sincerity.
While there are beautiful moments here — the tribal feline chanting on “Meow Hear Me Roar,” the delicately upturning piano arpeggios on “Fruits Of The Jungle Heart,” the delay-drenched drumkit on “Ruff-a-lution dub” — We Like Cats unfortunately fail to consistently weave in memorable elements to give each song its own stamp. We are instead left with long passages of amorphous echo, without the promise of anything to focus on for the rest of the song. Their intriguing endeavor to splice in elements of dub music actually sounds rather halfhearted. Poorly-derived samples (a blaring foghorn, a wickey-woo scratch of a record, someone with a Caribbean accent shouting “Rastafari”) are dumped on each tune in an awkward and frustrating way. The elements haven’t been carefully mixed, and the result of their genre-welding sounds rather contrived, even at times gimmicky. This is a stark contrast to the individual ventures of each member, where you’ll find innovative drone textures and focused experimentalism. When these three minds become one collective conscience, their solo skills simply don’t combine as one would hope.
Proper Eats was designed as a “summertime party record.” But however summery and party-prepared you feel in the upcoming months, the album will often only stimulate your reach for the skip button. In their assertion that psychedelic jamming can be quirky, upbeat, and fun, We Like Cats certainly have an admirable attitude; they just don’t quite have the music to back it up.
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