‘Equally Cursed and Blessed’ by Catatonia

Time can be cruel to albums. It can take what seemed to be a great album and reduce it to mediocre, or it can take what seemed a mediocre album and make it seem pretty poor. ‘Equally Cursed and Blessed’ suffers as a result of this. I remember considering it the weakest Catatonia album at the time – it’ll be interesting to see at a later point whether I still think this, or whether their other albums will have suffered as badly.

The album came from an awkward point in the band’s career. Their previous album ‘International Velvet’ had been very successful, and there was no real warning that that would happen. As a result, the band weren’t really ready for it, and it was the next album which paid the price. Its biggest problem, is that it adopted the media construct of the band. The band were talked about because they were Welsh, and because of Cerys Matthews. This album plays up both of these factors to the detriment of everything else. The opener, ‘Dead From The Waist Down’ was one step away from being a very brave first single, but it doesn’t sound like the recording of a band – it just sounds like Matthews singing over a session orchestra. It’s also a bit irritating. ‘Londinium’ is more band-like, but it’s let down by a whinging set of lyrics that seem to cry ‘we don’t like London, because we’re from Wales’. Everyone knew this already. ‘She’s A Millionaire’ is better, but it, and so many other songs, are still let down by the emphasis on Matthews, and in particular, her increasing habit of over-Welshing her accent. Compared to her vocals on ‘Way Beyond Blue’, which combined a Welsh heritage with a genuinely nice singing voice, listening to the vocals on this album is like being bludgeoned to death with leeks. When the rest of the band really do get to demonstrate the fact that they’re still around, the result is tracks like ‘Storm The Palace’, a pointless noisy rant about the monarchy which suffers from such a poor mix, that any actual lyrical message is lost in a sea of reverb.

There are some good bits sprinkled through the album. ‘Karaoke Queen’ is a decent pop song, ‘Nothing Hurts’ is quietly lovely, and ‘Dazed, Beautiful And Bruised’ has just the right level of epic, but it’s not enough to set this album free from the bargain bin of history.