Arts
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a good place to start describing Cats & Kittens (Theory 8), the new record by Murfreesboro indie-rockers De Novo Dahl. The book, which was written by the band's namesake, Roald Dahl, is iconoclastic but tidy: you can spot the good guys, but the good guys cause trouble every now and then. Tim Burton's forthcoming film version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, however, promises to be a darker, more complex reading of Dahl's tale. A two-disc set, Cats & Kittens is a lot like both: Cats has the mischievous charm of Dahl's tale, while Kittens mirrors Burton's jagged quirkiness.
Like Dahl's book, Cats is conventional, but with giddy moments that feel insurgent. The record's obvious references are American new wave and power pop, but as with DND's contemporaries Future Bible Heroes and Super Furry Animals, it avoids nostalgic overload by employing a healthy dose of indie weirdness. "Conquest at Midnight," for example, features staccato vocals and a synth-driven hook reminiscent of The Cars or Big Star—that is, until a dinky sounding synth patch takes over. More disorienting is the song's cocktail party repartee. Lines like, "You've got me trembling with fear / Well who hasn't my dear," sound like they came from a Hepburn and Tracy film, albeit via The Magnetic Fields.
The art for Cats features a roaring tiger; Kittens uses the image of a reclining domestic feline. However, the sinister look on Kitty's face is more menacing than the King of the Jungle's gaping maw, and that's a setup for Kittens, which is a twisted remix of Cats. "Conquest at Midnight," for example, reappears on Kittens as "Little Conquest on the Prairie." The back half of the song remains relatively unchanged, but the front half is a sparse, drum machine-driven version that relies on the plucked koto patch of the Cats version and replaces electric guitars with acoustic ones. Like the Gothic suburbia in Burton's Edward Scissorhands, the mix is jarring and uneven but pleasantly loopy.
Dahl died in 1990, so we'll never know what he'd have thought of Burton's film; reportedly, he hated 1971's simpleminded Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. There's also no telling whether De Novo Dahl's growing fan base will prefer the straight-up pop of Cats or the absurdist remakes of Kittens. Regardless, Cats & Kittens stands up as a whole due in large part to its underlying sense of rebelliousness, and that's something Roald Dahl knew a thing or two about.
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—Paul V. Griffith