Album Review: Catcall - The Warmest Place

It's been a long time since Sydney's Catcall (Catherine Kelleher) parted ways with her Kiosk bandmates and branched out on her own to start making some tunes that can only fairly be described as starkly different to her previous endeavours. Her experiments with hip hop that were the main focus of her earlier Catcall work have been put aside for a focus on polished pop and the results are outstanding.

After the short intro of The Warmest Place, a line referenced in the album's superb opener, August, the track itself is a reworked version of the track that appeared first on her debut EP, bigger and beefier, but the production flourishes have not taken away any of the charm of this infectious success. It takes no more than a looping organ line with big stomping beats for her to pull an amazing track out of almost nothing. Satellites follows immediately – it's an Empire Of The Sun-style indie dancefloor classic waiting to happen and steers away from some of the more '80s pop sounds that populate the record. These moments can be found most obviously on first single, The World Is Ours, the unashamed pop of That Girl and Shoulda Been, or on the slower electro ballad, Swimming Pool. But there are more moments where she displays a more refrained approach to slower-burning hooks like on August, such as on I Believed and the Europop-flavoured I'm In Love With A German Film Star.

A long-time coming it may have been, but Catcall's debut is a rich treasure trove of the kind of intelligent pop that for obvious reasons only shows up these days when indie artists take a risk on being popular.