Thornaby-on-Tees quintet Cattle & Cane release their début album ‘Home’ on Monday 14th September 2015. Consisting of siblings Joe, Helen, Fran and Vin Hammill, with Tom Chapman on percussion, the album features twelve tracks that perfectly showcase the timeless quality of the band’s music; shifting even the hardest of hearts with their perfect, soaring harmonies.
Heavily championed by the BBC Introducing team, Cattle & Cane performed at T In The Park and BBC Radio 2 Live in Hyde Park before they’d even released debut single ‘I Will Rise’, which has been featured by Spotify on one of their most popular curated playlists on the front page of the service. Thanks to this and their popular live sessions in the beautiful surroundings of Wynyard Hall, the band have now received well over a million streams online. With a loyal and passionate following, the ‘Home’ album launch will take place on Friday 18th September at the 1000 capacity Teesside University in Middlesbrough – the perfect setting for Cattle & Cane’s mesmerising live show.
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Lead singer and chief songwriter Joseph Hammill has spent much of his life kicking against convention, so it is little surprise that he refuses to build an alternative history for how the band took five years from feted performances in their home-town and 2010’s T In The Park via BBC Radio support to produce their début album, ‘Home’.
‘I didn’t feel my songs were ready’, he offers, matter of factly. ‘I was just about to start Uni and Helen hadn’t even got her GCSE results yet. T In The Park was a great experience, but looking back, it was probably a bit too much too soon.’
Yet, in this case, patience is most definitely a virtue as ‘Home’ delivers an album characterized by the quintet’s ability to meld soaring choruses and delicate melodies to everyman lyrics that swerve cliché to create a sense of community and shared experience. Sharing vocal duties with sister Helen, this family concern (four fifths of the band are siblings) create a music that revels in its intent to make big gestures and engage with people at root; as Joe would have it ‘..to connect with people and have the crowd signing the songs back at us, that’s the ultimate compliment as far as I am concerned.’
The result is an album that flows from the intricate drive of opener ‘Skies’, blending War on Drugs licks to a rousing dual vocal chorus, through the tribal rhythms of ‘Belle’ to the sumptuous balladry of ‘Red’ and the gossamer camp fire flicker of ‘We Were Children’ via those big communal moments where the choruses of ‘Sold My Soul’ or lead single ‘Come Home’ conjure images of festival crowds jumping in unison.
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