“Is it too late to join a band?”
It’s a rhetorical question many people have asked. If you’re a lover of music – as I know Joyzine readers are – then if you’re not in a band already then you probably harbour a deep desire to power-scream your vocals into a huge PA or shred the audience’s faces off with killer riffs on a Les Paul. Well, six years ago Dan Oh confessed to a friend that he wanted to be in a band but feared it was too late. Luckily for Dan Oh that friend was John Toohill, the polymath of distortion in the bands like Brute Spring and Science Man and the sonic astronaut, or ‘Dick Dale in outer space’, of The Hamiltones and Moon People. Toohill says, “I am a believer that being in a band is a truly unique experience and everyone should give it the opportunity to ruin their life”.
Toohill and Oh did a demo together which they used to bring in other friends (or “trap” as Toohill says), and start writing as a band. “Like a slow burn horror classic, we crept around for years and allowed the band to brood and become something new.” And slow burn horror is right as the band, and self-titled album, take the name Black & White Cat / Black & White Cake from a line in 1977 horror film The Sentinel directed by Michael Winner (of Deathwish infamy) where a young woman moves into an apartment in a building which houses a ‘sinister evil’ (trailer here).
This is gritty garage rock at its heart, fuelled by the kind of energy that powered The Cult or Fields of Nephilim. The bass sounds like someone has emptied a truck load of gravel into the speaker cabinet, the guitars are menacing and thunderous, the synth lines underpin the grit with tectonic drones, and the drum machine holds everything together with a punishing mechanical regularity.
The whole album has an otherworldly, slightly out of control feel and given its inspiration you can imagine many of tracks powering a vintage horror or something directed by Rob Zombie. Black & White Cat / Black & White Cake is edgy and dark and I get the sense that after recording was finished the mastering process involved a final mix in a deconsecrated church where they filtered everything through a 1970’s reverb chamber filled with the haunted cries of scream queens Cristina Raines, Marilyn Burns, and Linnea Quigley.
Black & White Cat / Black & White Cake are DAN OH: VOCALS | PAUL MORIN: BASS | KELLY MORDAUNT: SYNTH | DAVE WARD: GUITAR | JOHN TOOHILL: GUITAR
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Review by Paul F Cook
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