COSMIC KITTEN (San Pedro / Los Angeles, USA)
Coming to us from San Pedro, the port district of Los Angeles, Cosmic Kitten are a four-piece who apparently slept through the meeting where someone announced that the ’90s were over—which, of course, we mean in the best possible way.
Cosmic Kitten dig around in the dirtier drawer of alternative rock, where grunge, punk, noise and heavy guitars are piled up alongside the occasional shredded melody and just the right amount of rage. If you miss the days when alternative rock didn’t mean neatly groomed bands salivating over the prospect of playing huge festival stages, but rather feedback, fuzz, sweaty foreheads and songs that can explode from a quiet grumble into a full-blown guitar onslaught in an instant, then this is pretty much it.
At the forefront is Karen Marie, who can switch from an almost gentle, introspective vocal to a full-on scream within the same song. Around her, Zach Huckabee on drums, Jay Vesper on bass and John Chavez on second guitar make sure this doesn’t remain a mere nostalgic revival of grunge.
Cosmic Kitten have enough punk directness and contemporary noise-rock punch to sound far more now than Seattle 1992 cosplay.
Their references are no joke, either. They’ve shared stages with Redd Kross, The Dickies, Alice Bag, Avengers and Mike Watt. Their album Laugh of a Lifetime was, among others, recorded by Steve Moriarty of The Gits and mastered by Jack Endino, the man behind Nirvana’s Bleach. On their current album—their fifth, and their first for San Francisco label Psyched! Records—they’ve taken things a step further: it was produced by Alex Edkins of METZ, recorded by Ben Greenberg of Uniform, and mixed by Graham Walsh. In short, a pretty damn solid little family gathering of the noisy guitar underground.
The new album is appropriately raw and pretty much filter-free: frustration, emptiness, anger, revenge, bad decisions and picking yourself back up off the floor. But there’s no whining in the corner. With Cosmic Kitten, anger is above all a source of fuel.
Five albums and countless miles through clubs across the US and UK later, they’re finally stopping by our neck of the woods for the first time.
Music policy: alternative / post-grunge / punk / noise rock
Admission: €12 presale (mojekarte.si and their points of sale), €15 on the day of the concert
