Cat's Eyes
Their music was disposable pop born out of the most disposable pop era – the bleak, forgotten period between the end of rock'n'roll's first wave in the late 50s and the rise of the Beatles in 1962/63. But the girl-group sound refused to stick to the script. It was anything but short lived; you can currently hear its influence all over the place in alt-rock, from Glasvegas to Best Coast to the Vaccines.
Cat's Eyes draws in more esoteric musical influences. Badwan's collaborator in Cat's Eyes, Rachel Zeffira, is operatically trained – although her default style here is a kind of guileless, wide-eyed vulnerability that perfectly fits songs called things such as Not a Friend and The Best Person I Know – and an admirer of the Hungarian-Jewish composer György Ligeti.
Most satisfying of all, Badwan and Zeffira understand that the real power of girl-group records lies less in the melodramatic productions than their emotional heft: almost uniquely among pop music of the period, they ventured beyond the standard cliches of teen romance to address more substantial issues that might affect their audience: the girl weighing up the prospect of pre-marital sex in Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?; social deprivation in the Crystals' Uptown; the spectre of sexual abuse that seems to haunt the Shangri-Las' Past, Present and Future. Although Cat's Eyes' narrative arc is pretty straightforward – over a half-hour it documents a love affair, from The Best Person I Know to I Knew It Was Over – something dark and compelling lurks at the heart of the songs: they're not just melodically strong, they're genuinely moving and haunting in a way that, say, the oeuvre of latterday girl-group pasticheurs the Pipettes never was. The lyrics display a canny ability to catch the listener unawares, by suddenly switching from knowing, old-fashioned teen-pop chestnuts to something more adult and potent. "I know I'm not the prettiest girl," sings Zeffira on I'm Not Stupid, adding: "I'm realistic."
love them.so nice
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