Peter Cat – Starchamber: Cosmic, lascivious, and confident - SNACK: Music, film, arts and culture magazine for Scotland

The second album from the Glasgow based art-pop band opens with a squeal of synthesisers and the lyrics: ‘Take me to the Starchamber. I’ve been a very. Naughty. Boy.’

As statements of intent go, it’s a comprehensive one. While the first album, 2020’s ‘The Saccharine Underground’ was firmly in the erudite indie lineage of Haines, Hannon and Hawk, five years later they’ve left the kitchen sink behind and plotted a course for something a little more cosmic and a whole lot more lascivious.

One of the side effects of the mainstreaming of ‘geek culture’ is that a lot of the edges have been smoothed off – Star Wars is a largely sexless affair, Harrison Ford aside – where the comics and sci-fi of the seventies and eighties were a haven for fetish and kink. The universe that the band are exploring here is much more that of Flash Gordon, all revealing outfits and consensual restraint. Not to put too fine a point on it: Peter Cat fuck.

This is after all an album with a song called ‘Kiss The Ring’, a song with a coda of ‘gilded, glistening whole’, a song with voreaphilla fantasy. It is not subtle. It is very horny, but does feel a little bit guilty about it in that slightly catholic way that adds a frisson to the whole thing.

It’s also very smart. There’s a wonderful enjoyment of language – ‘a glorious day at the auto-da-fe’ – and a slew of pop culture references from Empire Records to Leigh Bowery, Earthworm Jim and Richard III. A sly humour, a delicious love of a double entendre.

It has the feel of a band who have grown into the confidence of their abilities and found a sound that – while wearing their influences proudly on their sleeve – is very much their own. Cramming euphoric italo into weimar cabaret, screaming glam guitars and Knight Rider arpeggios into a glorious cosmic celebration; this is a group of musicians brimming with ideas that firmly deserve the record company budgets of the seventies to spend on strings and choirs and lasers and – lets face it – skimpy outfits.

Right. I’m off for a cold shower.