Cagework dropped ‘Simmer’ in April 2018, receiving praise and support from the likes of So Young, Clash, Too Many Blogs and Rough Trade, with repeated spins from Huw Stephens, Gideon Coe and ‘Night Tsar’ Amy Lamé.
But what about since then? “We played through the initial excitement around the release of Simmer, which was really encouraging,” says Sam Bedford, principal songwriter of the trio. They went out on the road for spot shows and short runs of dates.
“After a while though, we needed to reassess what we wanted to do next and how to approach that.” The band took a step back from live after the summer to take stock. Cagework started as a bedroom project in the South West of England and it slowly got out of hand. So out of hand, in fact, that it became a band.
Taking inspiration from odd, lo-fi indie, post-hardcore and early emo, with smatterings of avant-garde folk, the band drew these somewhat disparate influences together to create an equally juxtaposed sound; dissonant, atonal and yet somehow hook-driven. Coming into Autumn, amidst growing global anxiety and fidgetiness of their own, a release began to take shape. The band recorded six tracks to a length of just under 15 minutes in their makeshift basement studio.
“It seems strange to want to draw a line under such a short period of time, considering we’ve been a band for less than a year,” says Sam. “But we were looking ahead and really wanted to have these songs documented, with so many more being written all the time.”
The EP was intended to be a self-release in early 2019, but through fate and good fortune, the home recordings found their way to Physical Education Recordings.
The band travelled up to Phys Ed founder Justin Lockey’s South Yorks studio to track their EP in much more compassionate and enabling surrounds.
The resultant self-titled debut is 16-and-a-bit minutes spread across seven tracks. There’re temporal and dynamic shifts, but there’s a thread of continuity. Sure, it’s not furiously angry, but who can sustain anger like that?. This EP reflects the familiar, pervasive malaise of 2018 and, by the looks of things, 2019. It also responds with a message of the need to reflect, a process the band spent enough time on to be relatively authoritative providers of such advice.
The Fat Angel Sings 