Picture yourself in a hidden alleyway bar, or perhaps even the lounge room of a house party some kid in your grade who you barely know is hosting while their parents are out of town. You can hear live music and suddenly the first thing on your agenda isn’t to grab a drink, it’s to get as close as possible to the band who sound like a raw version of Hole has made sweet love to The Vines, or maybe even Silverchair. Probably both. And that sound is Sydney three-piece Claire And The Cops.
Fuzzy twang and blistering power chords rule supreme for Claire And The Cops, a trio out of Sydney making hook-filled, grunge-enthused rock, and nailing it.
Singer Felix Lush really is a little bit lush, while Amy Duloy on bass and Scarlet Benson on drums give female musicians that fuzzy I-can-do-this feeling. They make up Claire And The Cops, a Sydney trio who have a sound quite unlike anything else swirling around the Australian music scene right now.
These Sydney rockers (the term ‘rockers’ sounds pretty cliche, I know, but if you caught their supporting set at Oxford Arts Factory last week, you’d understand why I use this generic term) are a self confessed ‘Garage Slop’ band, but the reality is there’s no actual ‘slop’ to attribute to CATC. To be a garage-style band and record as a garage-style band in today’s age of mastering tricks and hidden vocal layers is quite an achievement, and quite frankly, they’ve nailed it.
Available on Soundcloud, Bandcamp and cassette (yes, cassette – this band just keeps getting better), Lounge Lovers is the debut EP from this hook-filled, grunge-enthused trio from the north side of Sydney. After meeting when they were fifteen and constantly throwing around the idea of starting a band, Scarlet and Felix finally began jamming at Felix’s parents place, and without wasting any time they wrote their first song Invite You Into My Head.
The band name pays homage to Felix’s neighbour Claire who called the cops on them at the respectable hour of 3pm on a Wednesday afternoon for jamming their jams. Shortly after this, Amy joined the band to fill the gaping four string hole of their much needed bass player. In 2013, as they were finishing up high school, CATC began the journey of writing their debut EP.
The band’s debut single Need Ya is the kind of song that makes you want to lace up your Docs, slide into some skinny ripped jeans, don your most vintage bowler hat, and drink vodka out of a normal glass, not a jam jar. Because CATC are a little bit on the cooler, slightly-quirky-but-not-wanky, side of life. There’s a lot of distortion coming from Felix’s guitar and unless you really listen to the lyrics, you probably won’t realise you’re tapping your feet and slapping your knees to a love song. The EP follows suit with six tracks of music that sounds like three kids jamming in the basement with the undertones of very well planned and extremely well written songs.
I highly recommend you get yourself a copy of Lounge Lovers now so you can tell everyone you totes loved Claire And The Cops before they were a ‘thing’.
