Catatonia "Equally Cursed and Blessed"

Lurking about on the European continent in 1998, I frequently saw MTV UK (with that adorable Cat Deely) air Catatonia’s “Mulder and Scully.”

The song was one of those whose lyrics per se anchor it in a time by referencing pop culture; in this case, it was the Fox TV program “The X-Files.” Referencing then-current pop culture is always a risky proposition. “American Pie” grows more cryptic every year and “Lucky Lindy (1927)” or “The Movies Learned to Talk (1928)” are so emblematic of a certain gimmick that Mr. Show was able to parody the whole genre of “Songs about modern inventions” on a riff in 1996. In any case “This could be a case for Mulder and Scully” was an amusing way to say “something weird is afoot.”

However, if you watch the video, even to this very moment, a few impressions emerge:

• The backing music is a slightly-harder-tinged Beatles-inspired Britpop sound of the era. Leaning heavily on Oasis’ copying extreme homage to the Fab Four, most UK rock music sounded like this in the mid-90’s. It’s competent, but it doesn’t shake things up too much.¹
• The star of the song and video is Cerys (Kair-iss) Matthews, her vocal range, her phrasing, and even her inscrutable pronunciation. The band are fiercely Welsh.² As a result, her delivery is always a bit more engaging through its variations with a bit more of a hook than one might expect. Cerys trills r’s and add “ch” sounds to k’s where they are common in neither UK nor American English. It doesn’t sound wrong to native English speakers, but it disarming and engaging, not unlike the Mona Lisa’s smile. Do all Welsh people do this? Dunno. But her use of artistic license has a unique effect. This song shows Cerys can affect a little-girl voice, can growl, can belt across multiple octaves, can deliver gravelly apostrophe like a dragged-out vamp in a dive bar at closing time, and can yell like Chris Cornell.

Outside the single itself, Matthews was a darling of the English tabloids with her antics. In an interview I once read, that she recalls starting a night out in London and waking up in Paris. In an era where many UK bands were defining themselves by their ability to live lager-laden, outlandish lives, Cerys could have matched them toe to toe. And probably won. Thankfully the (could this have been so) bragging about one’s blackout tendency is (I hope?) a discarded trope in music journalism.

And, it must be noted, Cerys in that era looked like this:

Cerys Matthews as model

Discussing the band with another friend who’d spent her study abroad tenure shortly after mine, I mentioned the band once, and she said “Oh yeah, all the lads were in love with Cerys.” ³

However, as Cerys recounts, she never stopped reading books and collecting fairy tales between sets. And she was a lady who, in her down time, was immensely proud of being able to grow lettuce in her garden. While media reduced her to a drinking, fighting, and dissolute bad girl, that wasn’t really her.⁴

After I moved back to the States in late-Summer ‘98, I didn’t hear much about Catatonia. They’re another one of those bands that had a moment in the UK and on the Continent, but who (curiously) didn’t quite “land” here.

And that’s massively unfair. While “Mulder and Scully” might not have shown it, the band had more to offer. Like:

• Delicious poison-pen lyrics that ran counter to the general marketing of woman singers / woman-led bands of the era. This is hinted in “Mulder and Scully” in the line: As for some happy endin’ / I’d rather stay single and thin. It’s a couplet that wouldn’t be out of place in a Smiths song and sets Catatonia closer to Liz Phair or Tori Amos (as other songs discussed below do, as well) than The Corrs, The Spice Girls, or even The Verve
• A robust variety of songwriting registers: a boozy rag, an a capella with harp in kitchen-sink drama
• Character sketches fitting to Spoon River Anthology (or the Welsh version of that)

In this post, I’d like to tell a different story about Catatonia. Years later, where Cerys is an admired DJ on the BBC and speaks in a faint lilting whisper, I want to re-lens the band and tell about a Welsh band that had their music packaged, repackaged, marketed, and fought over in accounting books. I’ll ignore how Cerys was made a sex symbol and tabloid lightning rod to help feed the coffers of the recording industry. I’ll tell a different story about their music leaving the context and fame in history.

Once upon a time there was a band called Catatonia made up of bored and isolated young folks in Wales. They wrote clever and catchy songs. They sang in Welsh and English. Their singer’s voice was supple and ferocious; it could seduce and it could head-butt you as an opening salvo in a pub brawl. She was a sonic and cultural Boudicca. At a fevered peak in the 1990’s, Catatonia left Wales to try to make it bigger and became a commodity product adjacent to the “Britpop” narrative (viz. Blur and Oasis) as part of the “Cool Cymru” sound. That Catatonia never quite got their due, and that Catatonia’s final album is a complete piece that shows their versatility, capability, and uniqueness.

Let’s un-forget Catatonia’s Equally Cursed and Blessed.

General

Equally Cursed and Blessed (ECB, hereafter) features songs that can be sectioned principally in to three buckets:

1. Acid-pen Pop
2. Insightful Ballads
3. (Plain) Pop songs

My favorite songs are cultural criticism, the songs where the “pop band” experiments with genre and instrumentation, or when they weave in sounds and motifs rooted in the coastal/shanty/archaic English of Wales. But listening to the acid-pen pop selections, I always get a bit of a laugh.

“Dead From the Waist Down”

(Acid-pen Pop)

The record opens with one of its strongest tracks. It’s a bitter dirge that contrasts a vapid, media-mediated life with being a real human, a real animal, in the real world. It feels in opposition to London-life: a celebration of Welsh-life. In an utter elegy of despair that earnestness has died at the hands of vapidity, Catatonia overlay their profound cri de coeur for realness (paralleling the voice in Infinite Jest, a contemporary work) atop a soaring, lush string orchestration.

Cerys sings with her tricky, seductive, cruel lilt about some sort of post-modern, post-earnestness meltdown of meaning and honesty that has deadened our most-primal urges:

Victory is empty
There are lessons in defeat
But we’re dead from the waist down
We are sleeping on our feet
We stole the songs from birds in trees
Bought us time on easy street
Now our paths, they never meet
We chose to court and flatter greed, ego disposability
I caught a glimpse, and it’s not me

Catatonia are describing a neutered, sexless, vapid, future. In circa 1998, did they really see the rise of influencer culture and its photoshopped, selfie-shot vacuity coming: a place where sex isn’t primal, atavistic urge, but just another piece of subscriber-only content (Smash that like button!).

The trope of this type of sexlessness is wrapped up in, what I think, is a reference to Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s “ethical birth control pills” which, he slyly reveals in “Welcome to the Monkey House,” are taken by men in order to render their connection to their sex organs and sexuality so numb that they could be kicked in the crotch while reciting the pledge of allegiance and not have their voices waver in the least — hence dead from the waist down.

I often think back to this song because it now seems so shockingly prescient. I believe it forms a beautiful bookend to “Dazed, Beautiful, and Bruised” (the final track) which describes the painful reality of existing authentically through bitter times and finding the beauty in it.

“Londinium”

(Acid-pen Pop)

One of the pop releases off this record, ““Londinium” is also a dripping acidic critique on the UK’s capital as seen through the eyes of Welsh folks.

London never sleeps It just sucks

Well, OK, London sucks. Good for you I guess. But Cerys knows how to hook her voice around a barbed dagger and she lets the “sucks” sibilant linger like a snake and continues:

…the life out of me. And the money from my pocket.

She describes the sights: “sushi bars, wet fish” but lets loose in the chorus:

Euston, Paddington train station please
Make the red lights turn green
Endlessly.
My black cab rolls through the neon disease,
endlessly.

The bridge fully unleashes the desire to flee:

I come alive
On the M25 [Highway out of London to the West]
I won’t drink the poisoned Thames
I’ll chase the sun out West.

It’s a pop tune, but it’s got some dynamite lashed to it.

“Post Script”

((Plain) Pop song / Insightful ballad?)

This is the first pop song that’s out of the acidic registry but which, instead, is incredibly vague as to what it’s about. The best I can sort out, with Matthews’ behavior reaching a socially-commentable apex (drink, drugs, and sex), I believe that she must have been approached by / enrolled in / or recommended to some sort of group therapy.

The song seems to set up that as a woman who chooses to live wildly, she is always encountering do-gooders who would refer her to a (male) system that would sort her out. The implication is that her behavior in public means she needs reformation (“They recommended counslin’ / but I don’t need to talk”) against what she knows of herself (“But I’m a good girl, yeh, yeh”).

In many ways, Cerys’ antics and her rejection of the proposition that there was something wrong with her in this song prefigure Amy Winehouse’s life and “Rehab.”

I’m not entirely sure I’ve grasped the gist of this song, even all these years later. And the same is true for the next song.

“She’s a Millionaire”

(Acid-pen Pop)

I have absolutely no idea what this song is about. With its refrain of “she’s on it” and “she’s got it” and reference to “DIY gynecology” I thought it was something about menses. Is it pro-abortion or anti-bourgeois child-having or pro-woman in bourgeois life? I simply don’t know.

In other parts it seems to be about the privilege of being wealthy.

Besides its baffling lyrics, I usually just tune it out. It’s a pop song but, if there’s a satirical angle in it, I can’t decipher it. On the other hand: recorder solo!

“Storm the Palace”

(Acid-pen Pop)

Another of the acid-drenched pop songs, the driving beat drives more to punk with its constant refrain of “Storm the Palace.” In the breaks, Cerys rips fantasies of what should happen to the palace, monarchy, and privilege of the Windsor family: they should all be made to work at a grocery store, the palace should be made affordable housing, etc. It’s a gimmick, and a nastily anti-monarch one at that, but I find myself repeating the refrain readily as well as laughing at the acid-drenched one liner: “Tourism is congestion (UK English for “traffic”).” That one hits home having recently visited Times Square.

“Karaoke Queen”

(Acid-pen Pop…maybe?)

It’s a poppy satire where Catatonia take aim at the then-hot trend of karaoke and the bourgeois dullness of it…but also a celebration of how it’s kind of awesome and affordable and offers escape and fantasy.

I feel like this was meant to be an acidic take on the like fun of karaoke, but their heart wasn’t in it. Against their intentions, pretensions, and biases, I think they not-so-secretly kinda like the character in this song and they like the fact that they wrote a cheesy disco anthem about someone who enjoys karaoke.

It’s not a particularly good satire, and the music intentionally does an overwrought disco send-up (à la Blondie’s “Heart of Glass”), but I don’t skip it, even though I don’t care for it. The reason I never skip it is because of the lovely key modulation that happens in the last 20 seconds.

“Bulimic Beats”

(Insightful Ballads)

This is a song that reveals the artistic daring of the band, Cerys sings unaccompanied with a harp as accompaniment. This “insightful ballad” by my classification sounds like some sort of barrow-maid’s song (if it were slightly more earnest, it might befit a Decemberists song). Singing this song in the first act of a Broadway musical would be the suggestion that she’s about to get killed in Act II:

But dreaming is for moonrise
And moonlight ails these tired eyes
I treat him like a lady
I treat him as I would he unto me
Give Rose rose-seller a run for her money
With silicone and poetry [Cerys spits these words]
But it’s the end of me

In the penultimate line, she squarely yanks the anachronistic song into the present. It implies that the poetry and medieval gallantry conjured by the music and verse to kindle romance were also assisted by breast implants. The title suggests additionally that the narrator is also engaged in bulimia as yet another portion of her self to sacrifice for his regard. It’s using an old form with modern sensibility that creates a pretty clever dissonance.

But despite all the beauty (natural and purchased) in the song, she’s still losing him and losing this dream.

These harrowing lyrics ride on top of beautiful harp and soaring strings. It’s a daring arrangement whose dissonance is designed to help us feel the rent and bruised narrator’s mental state. It’s lush, beautiful-sounding, piteous kitchen-sink drama.

“Valerian”

(Insightful ballad)

One of my favorites, “Valerian” features this poetic bit of writing:

And don’t cry if crying means you’re sorry
Whatever the case I always felt out of place
As a matter of fact I always felt like that around you
I’m disinclined to toe the line
Under your thumb where I’ve become unwanted

The double couplet of

Whatever the case I always felt out of place
As a matter of fact I always felt like that around you

has always stuck with me.

In a plaintive folk, skiffle-influenced song, we are seeing, in conjunction with “Bulimic Beats” just how versatile the band Catatonia were and just how rich their arrangements could be. Their “hit singles” never revealed this depth.

On top of that, I think the song is, ulp, a murder ballad. Catatonia songs don’t give up their secrets easily, but after “picking one’s way to the sea” the narrator suggests that “It’s not the tide you gotta watch it’s me.” This line suggests that the estrangement from herself that she feels “under his thumb” may be soon coming to a watery end with his watery demise. It also features another fascinating aspect of their songwriting, using archaïsm in the lyrics. “Pick” as synonym to “carefully approach” is archaïc, but it’s also what one does over sharp, rocky coastline (i.e. Wales); y’know the kinda coastline where an “accident” might happen.

“Shoot the Messenger”

(Insightful ballad; character sketch)

The band shows their flair for different genres and satire by delivering a boozy-sounding cabaret number. Cerys’ voice is raspy and shattered suggesting a broken-down cabaret singer. Her primary accompaniment is a musical saw(!). Altogether, the song sounds like a boozy cabaret rag of bitter heartbreak. It’s not something you’d hear on the radio, but it’s something that the talent and versatility of Catatonia could do.

“Nothing Hurts”

(Inightful ballad)

If the pain, heartbreak (and murder?) of the previous three songs has suggested some sort of agony, “Nothing Hurts” is the hurt beyond hurt, the hurt into numbness as demented bliss. It’s hard to say whether the song here is a psychotic break or actually acceptance. I’m inclined to believe the latter, but I’m an optimist.

Opening with a dreamy “Do-do-do” and rich strings that recall Björk of the era (Possibly Maybe comes to mind), we’re invited into a world where we can flee the hurt forever. In my mind, though, Catatonia are offering us this fantasy because their next song is a celebration of rejecting psychotic break in preference to a life in the muck: real, brave, and bruised.

“Dazed, Beautiful, and Bruised”

( Acid-pen Pop)

The album sticks the landing with acid pen and the provision of a bookend to “Dead From the Waist Down.” It’s the salve to those who traveled the tracks in-between. It’s the offer, to those that hurt and those that feel, that hurting and feeling means living a more real existence.

But I can tell you’ve been through hell
Finally, you wear it well
It’s an accessory.
It’s time to change your uniform
and hand it on to me, to me

Cerys is there to say, we’re like this, you and me. And you’re not alone. I’m the same way and we’re daazed and bruised for it. And check out those rhymes both in the previous section and this:

And I dream one day I’ll find
the one who lives inside my mind.
They feel the same way too
we’ve all been used
Dazed, beautiful, and bruised

Cerys leaves it all on the stage in the outro:

When there’s nothing, nothing left to lose
Dazed, beautiful, and bruised
Dazed [more juice]
Dazed [even more juice]
Dazed [yet even more juice]

UK / US Versions

At this point the UK version of the album ends. For the US market, two tracks from International Velvet were re-released.

“Road Rage”

Both “Road Rage” and “Mulder and Scully” were re-released on this record (in attempt to reach the American market), but they both appeared earlier on the band’s prior record “International Velvet.” To my mind, ECB ends with “Dazed, Beautiful and Bruised.” Nevertheless, it’s obvious why this song was a single. On top of the Catatonia-typical impenetrable lyrics and Cerys’ engaging pronunciation (“Why trill the R in ‘road rage?’”) it pulls the listener forward in a happy sort of bounce.

“Mulder and Scully”

I believe enough has been said about this track already.

Bonus: “Strange Glue” from International Velvet

Or, for a gloriously-filmed, black-and-white video:

I love this song for this lyric:

When faced with my demons
I clothe them and feed them
And I’ll smile, yes I’ll smile as they’re taking me over

And if I cannot sleep for the secrets I keep
It’s the price I’m willing to meet
The end of the night never comes too quickly for me

Conclusion

Once upon a time, there was a Welsh band called Catatonia. Their members were versatile and nimble. Their songwriting was subtle and acidic (when it wanted to be). Their writing was also tender, wild, and sweet (when it wanted to be). They had some pop success, but they were too big to fit into pop’s narrow lanes. And their record, Equally Cursed and Blessed is one I’ll never forget.

Footnotes

1. For the record, Catatonia’s other tracks show the band to be versatile and inventive in arrangement and instrumentation, but it doesn’t show on this track.
2. Earlier songs featured the refrain: “Every day I wake up and I think the Lord I’m Welsh.”
3. I don’t think the proper noun was love, exactly.
4. And even then, who are we to judge?

• music
• wales
• catatonia
• 90s