Here’s another retread from the olden days, this time late 2015. A guy I hadn’t seen in years showed up in my section at the ballpark I was working in (Camden Yards in Baltimore) and we got to talking. We’d worked together at a Rite Aid warehouse and gotten to know each other as fellow smokers, simultaneously eating, and get this, it was indoors!!! Walled off from the straight people and with its own ventilation but indoors!!! Some loophole having to do with the fact that Rite Aid sold smokes, so they had to make allowances by law or something. It ended while I was still there but it was cool, as was the cafeteria with very cheap and decent foods of all kinds, plus every kind of vending machine you could imagine. There was a fucking machine that made hot dogs! They were great!
Where was I? Oh yeah, retread… That guy, Paul Ray, who passed a year later at 66, had good taste in music, as proven by our conversations while indoor smoking/eating, and when he recognized me at the ballpark we reminisced and eventually he reminded me of this very odd band and another one called the Ditty Bops, still weird but far less so than today’s subject, Katzenjammer. Decent success across Europe, almost none here. I haven’t kept up but I think they may still be active individually if not with the band anymore. I bet wiki knows but that smacks of effort so… On to the timeless piece! It’s still good! 11 year rule!
You never know when or how you’ll find something “new” musically that excites you. Since I don’t listen to music on the radio aside from some very specific shows that specialize in ground already trodden, it rarely comes from there. Most of my friends are in similar age-related cul de sacs musically to myself, but recently a guy I used to work with turned me on to this band Katzenjammer.
I should have taken his advice and checked it out sooner. He’d alerted me to the existence of the Ditty Bops years ago, and they’re pretty cool too, but man… These Katzenjammer people are in a league of their own!
They’re an extremely odd aggregation. Four women from Norway that met at music school and felt like outcasts, preferring to play original things rather than the classical and jazz material in the books and being played by everyone else obediently. As far as I can tell, they have the originality thing down. That’s understatement, son.
It’s difficult to categorize their music, impossible in fact. On one tune they’ll sound vaguely bluegrassy or Irish, on the next it could be punk rock ugliness giving way to shiny pop melody, on another it could be minor key Kurt Weil cabaret type broadness and bluster. One review I read used the phrase “circus band gone rogue”, and that seems as apt as anything else.
All four women play multiple instruments, at times simultaneously, and all four sing, often in lusciously layered harmony. They write some of their own material, and have a non-band-member that writes for them as well, a guy I think, but with the Scandinavian names it’s hard to tell. Oh, and everything’s sung in English too, with that Abba accent, though with much more interesting things going on musically.
There’s a lot going on on every tune, and it’s frankly a little exhausting to listen to too much in one sitting. I guess you could say it’s overproduced, with oddball instruments and cascades of vocals fighting for aural space, often on top of that giant triangular bass going “oom-pah”, but for me it all works, at least with a little quiet time between listening sessions.
I guess there’s not much more to be said here, nothing that can’t be better conveyed through watching a few clips. There’s a sense of humor to this stuff, lots of weirdness and wackiness to go along with the really pretty advanced musical sweetness and Norse power, and that’s definitely on display in these videos.
These gals are even better live, or almost as good anyway. Top notch musicians, able to do justice to the complex tunes all by themselves, without hordes of backing musicians and singers. As fun to watch as to listen to!
Let’s start with one of my two favorites from the one Katzenjammer album I’ve had time to fully digest thus far (the other two await!), A Kiss Before You Go. This one is the second track, and is preceded by a very nice contrasting bit of darkness, making the sing-song melodies here all the more arresting. Listen for the sly key changes and drifts into minor-keyed gloom. Love the toy piano providing the primary hook too!
This next one’s got an Irish feel to it, at least to start. Love the banjo, a frequent part of their sonic landscape, along with glockenspiels and mandolins and that giant three string acoustic bass. Often times the drummer will be playing a mandolin on the live clips, while working the bass and hi-hat. Crazy.
These two tunes are actually pretty normal compared to a lot of their other tunes. They do a really strange cover of Genesis’ “Land of Confusion” that sounds like something you’d hear at a surreal Balkan wedding, and a few tunes that border on punk and resolve into ear candy pop. And of course the darker, cabaret style tunes that sound almost Russian. Odd odd odd. But fun!
I’ll close the festivities here with probably my favorite Katzenjammer clip, a very live version of their classic “Demon Kitty Rag”. Love the gal that sings this. She’s fun! Sings great too! Real great, and real fun! I promise! Click now and see!
Impossible to put these gals in any one bag. I saw one place call ‘em “symphonic pop/swing”, whatever that means. Add the “circus band gone rogue” thing to that and maybe you begin to get a handle on who they are in word form. Listening is better!
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Music and more with claudecat17 (aka Chris Davlin)! 
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