Cat's Eyes: "I Knew It Was Over"

Guy-girl throwback duos usually don’t work. Trying to recapture the spirit of Lee and Nancy, Serge and Brigitte, Johnny and June: it takes far more than talent, work, and luck. It takes chemistry and magic. Cat’s Eyes, improbably, have this element. Faris Badwan and Rachel Zeffira have created a tightly restrained world that plays directly to their strengths. The unique shoegaze/post-punk of Badwan’s dayjob with the Horrors informs the nihilistic, gothic atmosphere, combined with Phil Spector/Scott Walker orchestration and the more modern vulnerabilities of Belle & Sebastian-style twee. Romantic with only the barest hint of sentimentality, and with a similarly engaging-yet-detached sense of composition, they somehow outgun every other recent Wall of Sound ripoff from the start, approaching the project in a focused, songwriterly way, never quite letting on the vastness of their abilities.

“I Knew It Was Over” is tucked in at the end, atypically quiet and short, with only brief, plaintive lyrics: “I knew it was over / I didn’t have to ask why / I knew it was over / Before you said goodbye.” But Zeffira’s “O Holy Night” piano arpeggios and Badwan’s chastened lead vocal are beautiful, a perfect microcosm for the rest of the album. The perversity of operatically-trained Zeffira’s lo-fi mousiness is ramped up further by her wordless, ghostly vocal presence. Badwan’s commanding theatricality and production is reduced to a pinpoint; in the video of them performing the song at St. Peter’s Basilica, he seems like an overgrown choirboy, carefully finding the notes in a vast space. Recalling the powerfully minimalist approach of the Zombies’ “The Way I Feel Inside,” Cat’s Eyes, with nothing more than piano and two careful, sad voices, embrace the tragic undertones of classic pop instead of stumbling or riffing on them, revealing themselves to be almost staggeringly capable as both writers and performers.