The best pop commits to capturing, but also transcending, the moment that spawns it. And the pop music that's dominated both the indie and mainstream spheres in the past couple of years has documented a couple of recurring trends in particular: the fusion of pop and bombastic, art-damaged fashion (figures as disparate as Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, and Santigold), professions of strength, empowerment and selfhood (from Beyonce's "Single Ladies" to Kelly Clarkson's "Stronger"), and the sort of glorious, last-night-on-earth hedonism (Ke$ha, LMFAO) that has necessitated not one but many companies to make t-shirts that say "Sorry For Partyrocking."
So when I say that The Warmest Place, the debut full-length from Australian pop singer Catherine Kelleher, who records as Catcall, feels firmly of this moment, I mean that she effectively has all these bases covered. There's a track with a mid-tempo "L.E.S. Artistes" chug called "Art Star", there's a song about not feeling lonely when you're alone ("On My Own"), and there's the obligatory dancefloor-ready song that goes "Another bottle down, then just a little more." But, through and through, The Warmest Place is so aughts-by-numbers that it already feels like a relic, frozen in a moment it can't quite transcend.
It's not hard to pick out the best song on The Warmest Place: It's the lead-off cut, "August", which gets things off to a misleadingly promising start. Sounding a little bit like a Glasser track with a harder beat, the synth-driven "August" drives towards its bombastic chorus, a single "Ohhhhh" that Kelleher holds like she's intent on blowing your house down. Though she's not a particularly distinct vocalist, she's strongest on a song like this one, aiming more for sheer power than emotional nuance, wrapping her voice around abstract monosyllables rather than chattier lyrics. If only "August" weren't such an anomaly.
There are far more contenders for the worst song on The Warmest Place. It might be the grating and tasteless "Paralysed" ("Ooh, ooh I cannot move/ I am a-paralysed/ Aaah!") on which Kelleher's vocal sounds so stilted and stiff that it's baiting me with all sorts of "Paralysed" puns that I'll respectfully let pass. Maybe it's "Art Star", on which Catcall lobs a couple of softball insults ("I told my girlfriends your name/ They say they've seen you and you've got no game") that-- although they're backed by a playful, Le-Tigre-at-the-roller-disco beat-- have about as much sass as a wet noodle. (She pauses so long between each line that you start to worry that she's going to fall asleep before she reaches the end rhyme.) But the worse offense is probably the face-palmingly literal "Swimming Pool", on which the Euro-trash synth sunbursts are as awkwardly porny as the lyrics ("Goosebumps all over/ Nipples harden"). If hell is an American Apparel, this song plays there on loop.
It's easy to pick out Catcall's influences (the single, "The World Is Ours", has a Sleigh Bells-esque chant and a cheerleader themed video, while "I Believed"'s bassline is a dead ringer for the Gossip's "Standing in the Way of Control"), but pastiche isn't the record's greatest crime. Instead, it's its refusal to do anything new with the reference points it wears on its sleeve. Because as tuned into the pop cultural moment as these songs are, something about the atmosphere they document feels oddly blank, devoid of the slightest lyrical texture or detail. For example, the snoozy cover of the Passions' "I'm In Love With a German Film Star" is the vaguest imaginable meditation on flashbulbs and fame; that the titular love interest is an actor at all seems to stem from the fact that someone wanted to rhyme "movie" with "it really moved me." And "Art Star" is even more puzzling. Centered around the flat taunt, "Grow up/ Grow up," there's nothing in the song to give it any specificity or bite: the only lyric that reveals anything about the person she's supposedly roasting is "You're such an art star/ Uh-huh." That the word "art" is uttered at all in a song this unimaginative adds an unintended layer of irony.
The thing is, there's already a song called "Art Star". It appeared on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' self-released 2001 EP, and a few years later Brazilian partyrockers CSS reheated that same conceit on the goofy-but-fun "Artbitch" ("I only show where there's free alcohol"). Both of these songs now feel dated in their own ways: the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' track captures something of the skuzzy, neo-no wave scene in New York just moments before most of its major players got scooped up by major labels, and the CSS album that spawned "Artbitch" has songs called "Meeting Paris Hilton" and "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death from Above." As novel as those things might seem now, they're preserved because the artists who made them were committed to the moment they found themselves in, however garish and grimy and absurd. Though not without a few fleeting moments of campy fun, The Warmest Place feels mostly like a time capsule from a blank world.
