Sleepy Kitty’s arty pop music is barrels of fun
These American musicians have served up eight smart, muscular and tuneful ditties
What’s the deal? Sleepy Kitty is the moniker under which expat Chicagoans-in-St. Louis Paige Brubeck and Evan Sult make both art and slightly arty pop music that tends nevertheless to stick pleasingly to the “pop” side of things.
On the pair’s new Flux EP, they’ve distilled what Sleepy Kitty does best to its essence, paring away some of the stylistic detours found on their fine first two albums to serve up eight smart, muscular and toweringly tuneful jangle-pop ditties in just 14 fizzy minutes. If Flux points the way to the future of Sleepy Kitty, the future looks very bright indeed.
Fans of such ’90s femme-rock luminaries as the Breeders, Juliana Hatfield and Veruca Salt, as well as sardonic present-day rock chicks like Courtney Barnett, Laura Stevenson and Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino, will find the duo very easy to love, while ascendant garage-rock kingpin Ezra Furman and His Boyfriends are fans and friends. The last time Sleepy Kitty passed through Toronto, in fact, was while opening up for Furman et al. at the Silver Dollar in March, and hunky Boyfriend/sax player Tim Sandusky recorded some of the band’s earliest material. Good company. Oh, and Sult used to play in underrated ‘90s alt-rock combo Harvey Danger if you’re looking for trivia.
Barrels of fun. Sum up what you do in a few simple sentences “We play guitar and drums and layer lots of harmonies and distorted vox with a custom pedal situation we call the Mark-E-Phone, named after the Fall’s Mark E. Smith. Then we trick ourselves into elaborate DIY video projects for those songs that require screen-printed animation, or covering an entire freight elevator in aluminum foil.
“For the video for our song “Math Class Is Tough” we are currently building a version of the Barbie Dreamhouse in our studio in St. Lou- is, but one that highlights her achievements in science, engineering and technology. It’s complicated.” What’s a song I need to hear right now? “Summer.” Lives up to the title. Bit- tersweet, buzzy bubble gum that’s already shaping up to be one of the songs of this writer’s summer. Where can I see them play? At the Silver Dollar on Saturday, with Girl-On-Girl, the In-animates, Thrifty Kid and Rebel 4.