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Setting the stage: Six-piece Aussie band Cat Empire writes, records music meant to flourish in a live setting

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For anyone who has witnessed Cat Empire’s uncanny ability to transform a mellow Calgary Folk Music Festival crowd into a joyfully frenzied mob, Felix Riebl’s recent revelation about his band shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise.

These days Riebl says the six-piece act operate with a basic guiding principle, even when recording in the studio:  Cat Empire shines most brightly in a live setting, so they might as well write songs for a live setting from the get-go.

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“We’ve reached this point where we want songs to come out of the studio and just be stage-ready,” says Riebl, in an interview with Postmedia during a tour stop in Philadelphia. “There’s a dynamic in this band where we challenge ourselves to really write music that’s going to stand up, or else it just won’t get played. We’ve got so much material. I think we have always been festival-stage conscious, whether we knew it or not.”

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Which is not to say that Cat Empire’s latest album Stolen Diamonds, released in mid-February, doesn’t contain an imaginative set of compositions. But the focus is increasingly on groove and maintaining its patented onstage wildness even as the band continues to dig deeper into various world-music strains.

Riebl sees Cat Empire’s eighth record as the final chapter in a trilogy of albums that began with 2013’s Steal the Light and continued with 2016’s Rising with the Sun. The common thread is producer Jan Skubiszewski, who has been at the helm for all three. But, again, the cohesion relies less on a focus on genre or lyrical themes and more of a deliberate push to ensure all the tracks flourish in a live setting.

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“There’s kind of a necessary combustion that happens in the studio,” says Riebl. “With this one and the last one, we didn’t rehearse at all, which I think was significant. We arrived at the studio and I had written a bunch of songs and the band kind of learned them the same day they recorded them most of the time. That creates a certain type of spontaneity in performance. Basically, your first idea for a part, your instincts, are generally the ones that make it. Which is not to say that some songs don’t completely change forms in the studio, because they do. But instead of rehearsing for a long time, learning the parts and performing the song, we wanted keep that spark of unknowingness in there.”

Still, while many of the tunes maintained that spark, they also benefit from the meticulously built layers piled atop the grooves. Sophisticated horn parts, synths and samples help bring a variety of sonic colour to the band’s inspired excursions into slinky ska (Barricades), soul-funk (Adelphia), punchy Cuban (Saturday Night) and even elegant French-pop (La Sirene, which features tasteful francophone lead vocals from Australian actress Eloise Mignon).

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“We’ve always stolen music from everywhere, like bits and pieces and just adapted ideas within that,” Riebl says with a laugh. “Coming from Australia, there’s been something almost humorous about that. I still think we have an identity as an Australian band, but we really have influences from all over the place. I guess our DJ (Jamshid “Jumps” Khadiwala) is pretty influential in that area in terms of some of the music he plays. More recently, that’s music from Cape Verde and quite rare ’60s disco and funk stuff that he really likes. He brings that edge to it, especially with the samples he brings in.”

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This has all conspired to strengthen Cat Empire’s reputation as a band with an ability to immediately fill club floors and festival fields alike with hordes of bouncing converts. Cat Empire have been darlings of the folk-fest scene for nearly a decade and have proven to be reliable mainstage headliners in Calgary on Prince’s Island Park and in other festivals that attract fans looking for adventurous music rather than familiar songs. The band will be making a rare winter appearance in Calgary on Friday, playing the University of Calgary’s MacEwan Hall. But Riebl says the band tries to bring a festival vibe to whatever venue they are in.

“The whole idea of a festival is that you go see bands that you know but you also go to discover bands,” says Riebl. “That can be really stylistically diverse. That’s very much the part of Cat Empire that I like insofar that I can’t really describe the Cat Empire sound very well. It’s very eclectic. But it also has an atmosphere that is distinct to this group of musicians and a fairly generous approach to performing music live. We’re trying to give and receive a lot in that space. I think that’s why Cat Empire and festivals get along so well. At festivals, we don’t have to justify ourselves, we just have to play.”

The Cat Empire plays MacEwan Hall on Friday.

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