Eyelash

Two years on from Burning Embers, Big Electric Cat again stoked its goth furnace in search of some forgotten nuggets. That scratch was undeniably successful, as the resulting Eyelash brought bigger beats and a smoother mood than previously seen, giving the band's latest darkwave incarnation a surprisingly fresh if somewhat dated update. The string-driven "My Last Breath" sets the pace for the album and, with every nuance playing to its second-wave forebears (most notably here the Mission), Big Electric Cat is so much the epitome of a latter-day electro-goth outfit that it's hard to appreciate just how tight the band really is. "Black Water" bubbles and chimes before beating the beats back in on themselves, early Cure-like, while songs like "Crash" bring the Cat's industrial edge to the front, leaving the closing "Transience" to take the speed back down to a crawl — demonic, with a deep thrumming beat that only just lets up with each progressive vocal verse. Tricky and slick, Big Electric Cat certainly could run tails and whiskers around many of its peers. The band is undoubtedly at the top of the heap of the x-wave goth movement that will, ironically, never die. And, although they did, somewhat sadly, come along too late in the day for the older generation, the late-'90s underground certainly wouldn't have been as special without them.