Suggested Listening: Soft Cat

12 Feb

Last year while putting together the local concert calendar for the blog I came across the band Soft Cat who was opening for somebody somewhere at the time. The songs on their myspace were demos, but I truly felt something grand on my first listen. Come to find out that Soft Cat was the project of Neil Sanzgiri, who also plays in the Texas band Talking Tiger Mountain. This new audio venture finds him living in Baltimore and collaborating amongst other area musicians and a few Texans as well. This spring Waaga Records (an offshoot of Lefse) will be releasing Soft Cat’s debut album Wild Space. Neil recently sent me over the album and had this to say about it:

Any concentration of wilderness, growth, or life contained in a surviving ecosystem located in an urban setting is known as Wild Space. It is a non-domesticated area existing and dwelling as arcane emptiness. Wild Space creates fear from the unknown yet gives context to conformability. Organisms grow and cultivate while going unnoticed. Wild Space serves as the in between spaces in our lives.

the album was written by the wild spaces of the railroad behind the Copy Cat in Baltimore, MD 2009.

people who worked with with me on this album include Andy Abelow (from Small Sur), Brendan and Adam (from Weekends), as well as friends from Talking Tiger Mountain, Sleep Whale, and Sunnybrook who provided endless moral support as well as contact with Waaga and Lefse records. Sianna Plavin and Bob Keal (from Small Sur) and many other baltimore musicians helped out as well.

I received this album on the first day of starting a new job that was located in northern Baltimore County. I found myself meditating on Wild Space while driving through farmland then woodlands then back to my brick row home in the evening. The visuals and sounds fused into this transitional time of my life – making it all the more meaningful to me.

It would be a bit unbelievable if this album affected most this way, but I will say this – Soft Cat’s Wild Space will be one of my most listened to albums of this year. Sanzgiri’s songwriting and guitar and Andy Abelow’s banjo playing set the tone for each song. If they stopped there in the creative process Wild Space would still be impressive. Sanzgiri’s creative voice is distinctive and charismatic channeling Woody Guthrie and Daniel Rossen in one fell swoop. He doesn’t stop there though. Soft Cat brings in blankets of sounds that wrap themselves around the heart of each track and elevates it. Some of these sounds whether it be horns, strings, or unknown are played by Sanzgiri himself while some are filled in by the large amount of friends he has collaborated with for this album.

Wild Space leaves me in awe. Now the world just has to wait for it (no official release date yet – but it’s in the spring). Neil is screen-printing/hand-making 200 copies of the album for the upcoming spring tour so make sure to grab one if you can. Here’s a few of my favorites from it:

mp3: Soft Cat – Silver Babies Sun

mp3: Soft Cat – It Won’t Be Long

Photo-Illustration by Laurent Hrybyk