Prairie Cat

It Began/Ended With Sparks (Fuzzy Logic)

Breakup albums tend to be kind of a bummer. Almost all of the most famous examples—Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Beck’s Sea Change, Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak—are sombre affairs, favouring slow tempos and sentimental reflections on loneliness.

Nearly every song on Prairie Cat’s first full-length, It Began/Ended With Sparks, is about heartbreak, but it can’t be pigeonholed quite as easily as most albums of its kind. Singer-keyboardist Cary Pratt (Cary Pratt/Prairie Cat”¦ Get it?) sings about the inevitability of romantic failure, but offsets his pessimism with poppy, upbeat arrangements. “Just Cuz” mourns the end of a relationship, but its bouncy piano and buoyant trumpets prevent it from ever sounding like a downer. The title track covers similarly bleak subject matter, but the mood is lifted by Technicolor synths and cascading guitars.

Even more significant than the arrangements, however, is the fact that Pratt never loses his sense of humour. “Never Right” plays its melancholy verses against a jokey chorus in which he quips “I treated her fairly/I treated her fairly badly.” The closing track, “We Tried”, is similarly punny, its refrain of “You can lie with me” eventually changing into “You can lie to me”.

Prairie Cat walks a fine line between depressing and goofy, and it’s therefore surprising that the album’s standout track is one of the only ones that have nothing to do with romantic failure. “Meanest Genius” is a song about unappreciated talent, a breezy organ groove with a devastating synth break that sounds like it was beamed in from outer space. It shows that, regardless of subject matter, Prairie Cat is one of the city’s most promising songwriters.