“Music has kind of been a godsend.”
It’s a sentimentality shared by many, significantly within the wake of a worldwide pandemic. But for The Cat Empire’s Felix Riebl, music has been each the catharsis and celebration he wanted.
The band shocked followers when, in 2021, they introduced their determination to disband after 20 years collectively, with authentic members Will Hull-Brown, Jamshid Khadiwhala, and Harry James Angus departing the band in December of that 12 months. Bassist Ryan Monro had already left a number of months earlier.
While the music business reeled from the consequences of COVID-19, and The Cat Empire struggled with the logistics of farewelling departing members throughout intermittent lockdowns and restrictions, Riebl was dealing with private tragedy at home: his younger brother, Max, was dying from an incurable mind most cancers on the age of 30.
“For me this is a deeply spiritual album,” Riebl says of the band’s new launch, Where the Angels Fall. “This album was great relief and joy, but it was also kind of survival for me, at an emotional level, I guess.”
When it got here time to call the album, a lyric from the monitor “Thunder Rumbles” appeared probably the most becoming.
“Looking through at what it was going to be called, Where the Angels Fall seemed to be true to all of that: it’s got reference to spirits and it’s got reference to the devil and it’s got reference to the artwork and the space that we were in and the time,” Riebl explains. “It’s also funny because when you break down the words it’s just ‘WTAF’.”
The band has welcomed newcomers Grace Barbé on bass, Neda Rahmani on percussion, Lazaro Numa on trumpet, and percussion and former touring member Danny Farrugia on drums.
For Rahmani, the choice to affix The Cat Empire was an apparent one. An extended-time good friend and fan of the band, it was a pleasure to play with them now after beforehand taking part in a number of phases beside them.
“I’ve been there for their landmark moments as a fan and a friend in the audience just seeing what their latest releases are, and I’ve had such a great appreciation for their artwork, their choices, their collaborations, their writing – so it was picking up the phone from an old friend, but also a logical move, and made creative sense to me – I didn’t need to deliberate over it for a second,” Rahmani laughs. “I guess that’s just every artist’s dream, for their friends to understand them, to see them; to see how you perform or how you relate to your community, and to feel like you could join their family.”
For Riebl, it was by no means about “replacing” the unique band members.
“You don’t maintain or uphold the spirit of a band by just replacing members like for like and saying we’ll try to copy what they did – you can’t, it would always be second-best,” he says. “If you want to keep the spirit of a band alive, you have to bring in people who are going to play to their strengths and do what they can do.”
It was thrilling, he continues, to get to the stage of recording with the brand new members and realise it was going to work.
“Because nerves are also really important,” he provides. “Doubts and all those sorts of things are really important, because if you didn’t have them then you wouldn’t have skin in the game. Whereas with this, it was a genuine challenge and a genuine leap of faith to try and see how this was going to happen.”
In some ways, Riebl is treating Where the Angels Fall as a kind of debut: that is The Cat Empire 2.0, if you’ll. And, funnily sufficient, it has been produced by Andy Baldwin – the identical engineer behind the band’s self-titled debut album in 2003.
“In some ways it was a return to the spirit of what The Cat Empire is: we want this to be like the first album – not in terms of sound, we’ve developed a lot as musicians – but in terms of intent and that overflow; that spirit and that sense of surprise that comes with a really good Cat Empire recording,” Riebl says. “And with Andy, it was really nice to bookend those two moments, those two debuts in a way. That’s how I’m thinking of it.”
The band took a distinct strategy to recording this album, utilizing a chaotic neighborhood music hub within the coronary heart of Melbourne to create one thing with a lifetime of its personal.
“We chose to go to a community music space because we didn’t want it to feel isolated,” Riebl reveals. “We didn’t want to go to a dark studio and go, this is just our world, and this is how it is. We kind of wanted to be spilling out onto the street – that’s how the album feels to me, it feels like it overflows, it leaves the speakers and goes genuinely out into the world.”
Riebl says there was one thing in regards to the house, which housed composer Peter Sculthorpe’s piano, together with century-old marching band uniforms and even a gong, which introduced out a playful childishness within the band.
“We were kind of like kids going into that first music space, like let’s try on this hat, and let’s go hit that gong over there,” he fortunately remembers. “So, there was something foundational about the whole experience, like what was that thing that made you go back to that room full of instruments? What was that thing that piqued your interest when you were a kid? And returning to that space to tap into that childishness was a lot of fun, if nothing else.”
Having orchestras and bands rehearsing within the house – together with a myriad of percussionists and musicians introduced in by Rahmani and the opposite band members – resulted in a mammoth 75 musicians taking part in on Where the Angels Fall.
Riebl says from early pre-production, he and [Ollie] McGill needed this to be “the most Cat Empire album” that they had ever made.
“So, instead of layering up three horns a few times to get a nine-horn sound, we’d get nine horn players in there to play it, so you get the personality of that,” he explains. “Instead of getting a string quartet, we got a 10-piece symphonic string section. We just went over the top with everything – that was our mode: let’s go over the top with every sound and every song and treat each song as a world unto itself. It was wild. It’s by far the most fun I’ve ever had making an album.”
Riebl speaks fondly of what he calls “danger” on an album, or the shortcoming to determine precisely what’s going on sonically.
“You think about Dr. John’s Gris-Gris or something like that, and you go, ‘What the hell is happening in that to make that sound?’” he laughs. “I think that this album for us has a bit of that quality. Even having had months of distance from it and listening back to it, it’s like, ‘What did we do there?’ You forget.”
The thriller, he provides, is so essential.
“If you want to create something that has a true sense of celebration to it, it has to navigate a lot of different spaces: it has to be dangerous – you have to be able to sing about great sadness on the same record as singing about something absolutely stupid,” Riebl says. “All of it goes together to create a sense of overflow: it’s not a glass half empty or glass half full view of the world, it’s overflow. That’s what The Cat Empire does well when it’s doing its thing.”
That juxtaposition of sunshine and shade is highlighted on Riebl’s favorite monitor on the album, a tune he wrote for his brother known as “Be With You Again”.
“It’s such a sad song, and I had a lot of tears recording the vocal for that song – and tears of companionship, in a way; they weren’t altogether bad,” he says. “But for The Cat Empire, how do you write something that’s a lament, essentially, and still give it that sense of life celebration, or life affirmation?”
The reply, on this case, was taking almost hymn-like chords and including a Samba Reggae rhythm to create an underlying celebration.
“For me that speaks a lot to what The Cat Empire can do, or what I can do with The Cat Empire, and that’s not to say that we should be afraid of those feelings,” Riebl provides. “Because we’ve already performed that song live, and it’s very moving, not just because it’s about me – it’s about everyone in the space who, in the face of something impossible or terrible or irreconcilable, is able to still find occasional cause to see life or be in life or to celebrate what it is to be alive.”
Riebl explains that he felt closest to his brother on stage or within the studio.
“And I really don’t mean that in an affected way, I just mean actually I feel like I can have a conversation with the dead when I’m in the movement of music,” he says. “You can be with the dead who you miss or who you love in the space of movement, for me, and that’s what the band can do. And I have become critically aware of that in the past year.”
That makes what the band does – significantly on a global degree – much more particular, he says.
“For the deeper celebration, which is grief, terror, joy, everything in between: it all gets thrown in together, in terms of what a human experience is,” Riebl explains. “What it is to be amongst one another, and what it is to be faced with the quiet challenge of your own life. And the band just makes cause to celebrate that or makes cause to allow for those few hours of departure, whenever we get a chance to play together.”
From grief and loss to pleasure and love, The Cat Empire is embracing all of it proper now, and there’s one factor Riebl almost cringes to listen to himself say out loud.
“Part of the reason why I’ve been so excited about what’s happened is that you don’t often get a chance to fall in love twice. I think I was about 19 when Ollie and I officially put The Cat Empire together with Ryan on bass, and it was a trio that grew and everyone I met in the early days was like, ‘Wow, this is amazing, I’ve got to be in it’ – and the chemistry happened. Now I have the opportunity to have that a second time and re-discover that genuine love for a project and through new eyes, through new people, through fresh energy and talent.”
And whereas making this album, Riebl realised the band is barely simply scratching the floor of the place it may go.
“For me, having The Cat Empire come back and realise how creative a band it is, and how expansive it can be, we can pretty much choose any musical style and it can become Cat Empire. Any rabbit hole we want to go down, or any place in the world we want to get to and be influenced by we can, and that’s one of the beauties of this band: it’s not pigeonholed,” he says. “So purely from a musician’s perspective and an outlook for a career and imagining becoming genuinely happy old people on stage together – not that we’re old now, but I can see that. This album was kind of a launch pad to my falling in love with music all over again.”
Now, Riebl says, it’s only a matter of placing within the work and having fun with the trip.
“That’s all you can do, especially these days. You can’t take anything for granted, I think that’s something we’ve learned collectively. Especially in the music world, but probably in the broader sense, too,” he says. “I appreciate that feeling of making every night count – that’s important to me now. Whereas once maybe it was about an ambition to get somewhere or to create a legacy, now it’s really to enjoy the ride as much as we can and to be as true musically… and be as childish musically as we possibly can be.”
The Cat Empire’s Where the Angels Fall is out by way of Ditto. Watch their recent Rolling Stone AU/NZ ‘In My Room’ session right here.
