“… THE LOVE FOR FRIENDS THAT SIMPLY SLIPS AWAY…” SAYS PAUL FREDERICK IN HIS THOROUGH SLEEVENOTES FOR THIS ARCHLY TITLED AND NEWLY RELEASED TWO-DISC GATHERING OF THE FAMILY CAT’S NOTABLE MOMENTS.
The band’s frontman is writing on the meaning of 1989 debut single TOM VERLAINE but, equally, he could be talking about the group itself: people move on, time passes, recall fades…
With very little material from the band available on CD prior to ever-loving label 3Loop issuing this neatly curated anthology, The Family Cat had been ushered out the back door and quietly obscured from alt. music memory as a particular generation set about digitising its history.
Hearing FIVE LIVES LEFT is like opening up a forgotten and dog-eared sugar-paper scrapbook from your Uni days and seeing the old photos within spring out with extraordinarily luminant nowness. So, despite being a potent and precious collection for anyone of ‘a certain age’ and ‘a certain ilk’, through 40-or-so tracks its great vitality never plays as an overwhelming nostalgia trick. The vast majority of these two discs is loud, fresh and urgent. Just as the band’s gigs were, it’s all right in your face from the off. Feedback and overdrive are everywhere – roughly akin to a West Coast The Wedding Present which may just explode when unwrapped. 
WONDERFUL EXCUSE churns through the earth with aggressive spiralling might, while single REMEMBER WHAT IT IT IS THAT YOU LOVE – described by Frederick as “a pulverised rehearsal riff” – has propulsive liquid bassline and hair-trigger drums tautly intertwining for a perfect three-and-a-half minutes suspended at the end of a coiled spring.
RIVER OF DIAMONDS is presented in silt-bed album version (from FURTHEST FROM THE SUN, and featuring PJ Harvey on backing vocals) despite the band’s obsession with “not having got it right”. It was retooled with more euphoric shove for an EP but, for the purposes of this compilation, that second version was considered “curiously atmosphere free”. In truth neither take is in the slightest bit “atmosphere free”: both are dense brooding then widescreen soar. PLACE WITH A NAME is a whisker away from Sugar’s IF I CAN’T CHANGE YOUR MIND, in sound if not mood. “Listening to Leonard Cohen, though heaven knows why,” sings bittersweet voiced Frederick, layered Beach Boy harmonies soaring up, off and away over a Camper Van Beethoven acoustic power-strum. ENDLESS CIGARETTE is circular, smoky and addictive – as it was when last you lit-up – while STEAMROLLER is a Saturday afternoon terrace air-punch. The controlled anger of BRING ME THE HEAD OF MICHAEL PORTILLO seems hilariously cruel in the wake of the ex-politician’s degeneration into TV train-trek eunoch. Oh well.
The first disc of FIVE LIVES LEFT is, essentially, a collection of misses – though one or two singles did flex a claw at the Top 40 – while the second contains b-sides, BBC radio sessions and five previously unreleased gems. The world has almost certainly not been waiting for five previously unreleased gems from The Family Cat, but here they are (a pawful that would have made it to the band’s fourth album, had they not disbanded in 1995 after not recording it), and here they are welcome alongside the 31 other rugged and robust remastered tracks. Listening back to this band’s late 1980s / early ’90s bright, muscular and dangerous three guitar detonator offers confirmation that, in comparison, much of what was going on around them was something of a damp squib. And it begs a question… Why weren’t The Family Cat massive?