The Cat Empire - Steal the Light

Renowned Melbourne band The Cat Empire return with their brand new album 'Steal the Light'. Their first fully independent worldwide release, the record will be out on Two Shoes Records through Inertia. The album began it's conception in the European summer of 2011, when vocalist Felix Riebl was in Athens working on the opening and closing ceremonies of the Special Olympics. "I was living in a two-star lodge in Monastiraki and wrote many early ideas on a small keyboard in that room, with a view to the white city haze, the riots, the strange furniture shops, and the Acropolis". The ideas continued to germinate following a tour of the USA, when Felix fulfilled a long time dream and attended the New Orleans Jazz Festival. "What started as a planned week turned into 2 months. I was captivated by the mystery of the city, it's extraordinary history, it's Caribbean colours and European architecture, it's relentless and deep music." "It brought me back to a feeling I had at the very beginning of my career with The Cat Empire. There was also something wild about the place - the dancing, the ghosts, the sadness and celebrations in the old haunted streets. I loved being trapped there, and many of the melodies started there." the resulting album, 'Steal the Light', comes after more than ten exhilarating years together, which has seen the six-piece traverse the musical landscape to forge a signature sound that transcends genre by virtue of it's pure improvised energy. Following the breakout, triple platinum-selling success of their first major release in 2003, The Cat Empire watch descriptions of their sound grow longer and longer - jazz/reggae/funk/latin/gypsy/hip-hop, and so on - as they would jump from one genre to the next, many times within a single song. It didn't matter what it was, as long as people were dancing. Yet, on 'Steal the Light', the band's music grows out of it's 'multi-genre' concept into something wilder; bringing together both melody and rhythm. "In many ways this record is a return to our original aesthetic, a very simple thing; that the music is for dancing and feeling good; and that the beat of the record belongs to all nations. Having said that, we are ten years older now than when we made that first record. So the lyrical content is different, the energy is different. But it should make people smile, make people dance. That's all we wanted," says trumpet player, Harry Angus. Always changing, always exploring the boundaries of their mutable and uncertain identity, The Cat Empire have reached some kind of event horizon on 'Steal the Light'. The rhythm is front and centre, harnessing a feeling of beautiful chaos, ancient ritual and glorious colour, all caught up in the magic of the beat.