We know as well as anybody that all great music is subjective.
And, in our eyes, that’s the beauty of it. One man’s masterpiece is another’s mistake; one person’s favourite song is guaranteed to grate on the ears of someone else until they feel like they can’t take any more. The song that soundtracks your future first dance will be the one song that makes somebody else immediately change the radio station.
Heck, some people’s favourite singer is John Mayer, and we still don’t pass judgement.
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Still, all things considered, we think that it’s objectively quite hard to dislike The Cat Empire.
Are you morally opposed to bands whose live show is as close to a guaranteed good time as it’s possible to get? Do you have a problem with an artist who has continually proven themselves to be amongst the best live acts on the planet? Or did you just manage to miss their sold-out show at Bristol’s O2 Academy earlier this month?
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We can’t promise many things in this world: but we can promise you, dear reader, that even the most disgruntled of dragged-along partners left The Cat Empire’s Bristol show as a die-hard fan of these uptempo Australian ragamuffins.
If you’ve never had the pleasure of seeing them, then let us try and break it down for you. Imagine an impossibly tight jazz band and give them a couple of decades’ worth of great songs. Then, pile on enough funky breakdowns to leave Nile Rodgers in a cold sweat, and have the entire thing be fronted by a man who’s half laid-back Australian cool, half uber-suave funk/rock dynamite.
From the moment they bound onto the stage and launched into Bulls to the moment they strode off stage after a climatic rendition of The Chariot, Felix Riebl and co. gave the crowd a textbook example of how to grab the attention of every single person in the room and keep it in a chokehold until the end of their set.
If it was danceable, high-energy funk music you came to see, it was there in spades; but then, if you were after some genuine displays of musical virtuosity, you wouldn’t have left disappointed, courtesy of the sublime musical efforts of the band’s never-failing rhythm section and horn section.
It’s hard to guarantee anything in this crazy world – and yet, if we’re willing to attempt to state anything with certainty, it’s that you’ll have the time of your life at a The Cat Empire show.