Mushroom Music Publishing

There is no gypsy and there is no cat, but there is a Gypsy & The Cat, an electronic duo who, instead of pumping out house beats and booty-quaking basslines, pen gorgeous mini epics of forlorn beauty and elegiac romanticism that, you can just tell, are about heartache and solitude, past girlfriends and future loss.

Funnily, or sorrowfully, enough, Xavier Bacash (who’s no gypsy) and Lionel Towers (who ain’t no cat) did used to pump out house beats and booty-quaking basslines, when they were both working as DJs in Melbourne and had a mutual love of French disco, which is probably why, even at their most exquisitely mournful, you can always dance to Gypsy & The Cat.

They didn’t meet until three years ago, but they did cross paths in the playground without realising because they attended the same high school – Lionel, who’s just turned 25, was three years above Xavier. As kids, Xavier learned the drums while Lionel studied classical piano from age 7 and proceeded to study music at college. More recently, Xavier has taught himself guitar and Lionel has taught Xavier piano.

They were in groups before Gypsy & The Cat such as Night Corps who specialised in “conceptual electronica” before the pair decided to form Gypsy & The Cat. In the studio, they handle all the instruments and technology, a mix of computer hardware, programmable software and conventional guitar-bass-keyboards-drums. “Whatever’s sitting in the room, we’ll grab it,” says Lionel. “Even the recorder.” Live, meanwhile, there will be other players. At all times they work under the influence of the all-time songwriting greats: Fleetwood Mac, Simon & Garfunkel, Michael Jackson, The Police, Queen – “heritage pop acts”, they call them.

They fluked their first song. “We’d been doing loops and dance stuff, and we were experimenting, when suddenly we wrote this song called City Lights Of Fire – that was the start of us writing songs,” they recall, adding that, so strong was their first foray, it has made the cut for their forthcoming debut album, Gilgamesh, to be released in Australia on November 12th.
After that came a deluge of songs, and eventually, they say, “We found our sound.”

But how to define that sound? And what to call it? Some have described what G&TC do as “dreamwave”, while other attempts at labelling it have included “Balearic balladry”, “semi-acoustic chillwave” and “electronic MOR”. To save journalists floundering around for a category, they’ve come up with one themselves. “We call it electronic soft rock,” announces Xavier. “It’s a bit dreamwave, and a bit chillwave,” adds Lionel. Are they the electronic Simon & Garfunkel? “You could say that.”

Of course, they’re more than just S&G with knobs on. Their treated vocals and layered harmonies are Bee Gee-ishly high and affecting, while Xavier’s guitar is as effects-rich and heavy on the reverb, delay and phasing as Andy Summers’.

“We love the big bands of the 70s and 80s, they’re our major influences,” explains Lionel. “We love anthemic, inclusive pop music – big, ambitious songs. Music that wasn’t necessarily created as ‘pop’ but that became popular.”

You can hear all of G&TC’s influences and experiences bursting out of their music. Jona Vark, their breakthrough song, the one where they found their sound, is as breezily melodic yet sumptuously sad as Buckingham-Nicks era Fleetwood Mac. A truly lovely, haunting piece of music, it opens with an evocative lyric - “She walks down the street, alone in the dark/And she’s got nothing to fear” – that sets the scene superbly and draws the listener in. G&TC are masters of concision, using few words to paint a vivid picture. They also have a gift for quiet drama: Sight Of A Tear is mellow but moving, all keening voices, keyboard washes and poignant chords.

This is MOR with edge, credible but with mainstream appeal. Running Romeo has a big chorus and giant hooks and already feels like a hit. The Piper’s Song is as instant appealing as an ‘80s staple and, like much of G&TC’s material, is simultaneously melancholy and uplifting. Breakaway pulls off that difficult trick of sounding classic yet unmistakably the product of a 21st century recording studio. Til Tomorrow finds the G&TC boys singing in a lower register over another heart-tugging chord sequence, with subtly synthesized orchestration providing colour and tonal variation.

It’s music for the morning – or mourning – after the relationship before, but it can be celebratory, too: the debut single Time To Wander is the kind of majestic, jubilant, mountain-top pop they just don’t make any more.
Impressive stuff. And they didn’t just write and perform it all, they produced it all themselves, in their studio in Melbourne, although for extra clarity and focus two contemporary giants of production, Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, MGMT) and Rich Costey (Muse, Glasvegas, Franz Ferdinand), were drafted in for final mixing duties.

Their songs, they say, concern “relationship break-ups and being young, dazed and confused”. They come up with the music together, but Xavier usually writes the lyrics because the relationship break-up generally referred to in G&TC songs thus far is the one he had with his ex-girlfriend, and as Xaxier rightly points out, “It would be a bit weird for Lionel to be talking about my ex-girlfriend.”

So what’s this all about gypsies and cats? Turns out that Xavier was at a vintage antique market when he came across a worn old book of children’s bedtime stories, one of which was called Gypsy The Cat. So they added an “&” and the rest is... mystery. “We’re into fairy tales and fantasy,” they say. “That whole Roald Dahl/JR Tolkien thing. It doesn’t necessarily seep into our lyrics – we talk about real life experiences - but it does maybe the soundscapes.”

And it will be there in their live shows. “We’ll have props and some fantasy aesthetic,” promises Lionel, although they won’t be dressing up. “We wear normal clothes – we want to create a world that everyone’s familiar with,” says Xavier. G&TC, who recently relocated to London, reserve their imaginative flights of fancy for their music. Lionel and Xavier agree that the dozen tracks are less fantastical than just plain fantastic.

“They sound... magical,” they say. There’s another label for them, then. Magic realism. Perfect.