THE STRANGE CASE OF FERAL!CAT?RED!
Salt Lake City’s Feral!Cat?Red! embodies an expressive, strong-willed hope and fracturing. Producing an unexpected rusting alloy, the band's EP, How Do You Know, When You Are Old Enough to Know Better?, released this past May, is intense. The 5-song EP captures an essence of decaying beauty that grows out of an old factory, crumbling inward, disintegrating like a beached whale corpse. Yet, too big to move, it's left in the sun, baking, until the smell, the rot, the metal framing, and the falling brick become unpleasant to witness. In those moments of destruction, however, its ugliness blooms, birthing roses.
Courtesy of Feral!Cat?Red! and Sarah Armstrong
Consisting of Annie Snow (bass/vocals), Sam Jessing (drums), and Ben Raines (guitar), there is an anxious symbiosis built from intangible aggrievement, creating an unlikely texture of metal, mathrock, and sludge. The EP presents itself as a heavily unwieldy force that perfectly combines these influences into something pleasantly messy.
Courtesy of Feral!Cat?Red! and Sarah Armstrong
Nothing is overtly tethered to a traditional journey; rather, where every sound and cry leads is mysterious. There is a semblance of direction while actively avoiding a consistent recognizable green light in the fog. It does, however, remain constantly in anguish, seething, and twisting as singer Annie Snow screeches as if a cigarette is being extinguished on her skin.
Courtesy of Feral!Cat?Red! and Dark.River.Photography
Its unpredictability produces something that sounds terrifying and deep, as if looking down the barrel of an abandoned well. That depth works in combination with the EPs lyrics. The written words to accompany this mathmetal team-up are intensely personal and mysterious. Highly poetic and interoperable, the narratives are visionary, waltzing with decay, heartbreak, anguish, death, love, and perseverance. Some tracks are poems written by Annie during a period of knee reconstruction, like “Made For The Weapon," "Beg For The Silence,” or “I Can Hear The Cilantro Talking Through Your Teeth.” Others are crafted in an organic process that starts sludgy but unintentionally turns to spaces of mathy wonder.
Courtesy of Feral!Cat?Red! and Ava Eastburn
The farther and deeper one ventures into sludge, it would appear mathrock lies on the other side, a swinging pendulum of untethered space, unpredictability, and anger. It is there that this band resides: a sound of a decaying past, covered and buried in twisting, vein-like overgrowth that strangles and moves towards the light.
