Take heed and get into the Cat Empire now. Get a spot in line (come on, you waited in line for four days for PS3, and they don’t even have any decent games), and snatch up a copy of their debut US release Two Shoes when it comes out in February. Unlike PS3, you won’t be able to get much for it on ebay, but the Cat Empire doesn’t exist for selfish reasons – their music is too generous for cynicism.

Garnished by the single ‘Sly’, Melbourne, Australia’s The Cat Empire scored international double platinum when Virgin released Two Shoes in 2005 and, has done very well w/ the 2006 follow-up Cities – the Cat Empire Project. But if America isn’t ready to embrace Manu Chau, then the Cat Empire too has to wait for its due. The U.S. got its best taste of TCE to date at the 2006 Bonnaroo music festival, but now has only a 6-song EP to satiate us until Two Step makes its first domestic appearance on Feb. 6, 2007.

But the time is right. The six-piece (and their horn and dance sections) rarely slips into the clichés of the styles from which they borrow, and achieves a greater whole than bands that amalgamate genres simply because they have no other way to set themselves apart from ‘the others’. It’s easy to tire of contrived ‘feel awright now, shake yo’ hips’ steel drum-heavy world music, but there’s nothing wrong w/ a little shaky-shaky when it’s done so genuinely as has The Cat Empire, even if it would be pap in less capable hands.

I’m hearing my grandparents’ Frankie Yankovic records mashed-up with some forgotten mariachi band playing an Irish jig, and that’s just the verse of Cities‘ ‘Waltz’.  Believe me when I say that I mean that in the best of all possible ways, and stop me before I spend too much time lauding keyboardist Ollie McGill for expert use of the Hammond B-3 and other vintage boards en route to some otherworldly-funk that sounds like it could have been made anywhere on earth, but only in Australia.  Forget listing each of the styles that Melbourne’s cultural ambassadors are capable of mastering and conjoining – that would take more space and redundancy than I’m allotted. The hip-hop/reggage/funk/soul/jazz/country/cajun band (for starters) should be listened to, not read, so check out their four-song EP available for download. 

There is a dubious, though not completely unwarranted, stigma attached to ‘world music’ that Cat Empire avoids.  Much of what is made under that moniker amounts to talentless reggae made by Europeans, or a lame Caribbean-synth swill that borrows enough from other styles just enough to make it somehow qualify as ‘international’.  No, this band will overcome pedestrian categorization, and just as there are too many styles to list and members to name, it’s best to leave the rest unsaid.  They don’t stick with one style long enough (which, incidentally, IS their style) to repeat themselves, and they are owed the same courtesy.

Cat Empire’s double-platinum self-titled hinted at what the band would score with Two Shoes in 2005, and Cities in 2006; if this upward trajectory continues, then The Cat Empire will do more than become ‘popular’ in the U.S. – there’s potential for a Former-British Colony Invasion if there are other Aussies of like mind. Two Shoes is the right album to get the U.S.-debut treatment (dynamic and emotional), which will be released on the Velour label. That’s not to say that Cities won’t make just as big an impression when it hits stateside shelves, whenever that happens – one thing at a time, and it will all fall into place.

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