Dave Douglas and Rachel Hoskins have left behind the full band days of their musical pasts and developed into a power pop duo with a big, polished sound called Attack Cat.
As for developing into a duo, Douglas says, “it wasn’t our intention at all — we originally were a five-piece and it just kind of happened that way,” with Hoskins adding, “and it just happened that we became a duo when it became popular.” In short, this is no bandwagon duo, so to speak, but the indie duo pigeonhole is one into which Attack Cat is often cast.”
The live show, however, sets the band apart from the duo scene. Douglas, who found success in the music business at the national level as a member of the band Relient K, goes to great pains to produce prerecorded multitrack drum and bass parts in a home studio, which remain in a multitrack format for use live. This gives sound technicians at Attack Cat performances the ability to mix the drum and bass parts as though there were a drummer and bass player on stage with Hoskins and Douglas, who perform guitar and keyboard parts live along with their vocals. Both members sing, and their vocals weave in and out of each other, trading off between lead, backup, and harmony, sometimes in the same song.
The duo configuration aside, the band sees themselves as being in the minority in terms of genre, equaling a kind of oxymoronic situation in which pop has somehow become alternative. For Hoskins and Douglas, at least, this is a legitimate perspective since in Cleveland, as Hoskins says, “there aren’t a lot of bands bridging the gap between pop and rock,” much less outright pop bands, according to Douglas.
On that note, Douglas says, “the indie folk thing is super popular right now, and I don’t have a beard, so people don’t really like to come watch us play that much.” Hoskins is not without her own sense of humor about the challenges the band faces as a pop band in a sea of indie groups, when she admits “I don’t wear moccasins on stage.”
All joking aside, though, while Attack Cat may not necessarily feel at home in the apparently pop-less Cleveland music community, they do have a familiar sound that would be at home attack cat running wild!
on pop radio. Still, they are set apart from other pop acts in a variety of ways, for instance via their playful vocal arrangements, their pop songwriting style set against the rock feel of their music, and especially via their attention to lyrical content. There is a literariness to Attack Cat’s lyrics that stems from the love of literature that the pair shares as well as the fact that Hoskins is herself a writer.
“So many bands, especially on a local level, struggle lyrically,” Douglas said. “Because [Hoskins] is such a talented writer the lyrics she writes are interesting and unique, yet meaningful.”
There is a conceptual approach to songwriting inherent in the band’s output that is clear from their various releases, but this approach is anything but contrived.
“If you limit your songwriting to only those songs about love and romance — I know they’re universal themes, but you’re severely limiting what you can write about,” said Hoskins.
Branching out from these themes, Attack Cat has turned to literature (see Don Delillo’s White Noise and Attack Cat’s “Guns”), space (an earlier EP was entitled “When the Moon Was Big”) and even characters, such as the band’s recent foray into a hipster take on Bonnie and Clyde, which previews their upcoming EP — titled “Dandy Outlaws.”
“We don’t want to be the kind of band that just puts out the same stuff over and over and over,” Douglas says, “we want to let our imaginations run wild a little bit.”
Attack Cats new EP, “Dandy Outlaws” is available at your independent record store and on iTunes. The band will be performing at Brother’s Lounge on November 16.
“the indie folk thing is super popular right now, and I don’t have a beard, so people don’t really like to come watch us play that much.” I lol’d.