Artist: Eden The Cat
Album: Live In A Basement Apartment
Genre: Folk, Acoustic

The best music hits you like a drug. It rolls over your body with a sensation that can only be compared to the first drag on a much needed cigarette or the first sip of that whiskey you’ve been thinking about since lunch. You get high off great music. A high, I might add, that no amount of liquor, weed, smoke, or pills is ever going to replace. Great music puts you in a state of intoxication so entirely satisfying you don’t need anything else to be content with life, and that is the way you will feel when experiencing Eden The Cat’s latest EP.

Live In A Basement Apartment is the result of Eden The Cat finding herself with a few too many songs for her upcoming full-length, Funny Women. The songs were recorded in Eden’s Saskatchewan based apartment, partially while the singer-songwriter broadcast herself on Periscope. The resulting product is a little rough around the edges, with the vocals sometimes toeing the line of over-modulation, but the combination of Eden’s entrancing croon with her gift for melody makes every track spring to life. Whether she’s talking about the feeling of new love (“Teens”), or lamenting the fact drunk sex has lost its zeal (“Shithead”), there is something inherently infectious in every bar Eden shares.

If Amateur was meant to introduce us to Eden as a solo artist who isn’t afraid to get a little dirty if it means being able to tell her truth, and if Orphan Mothers‘ first LP was intended to showcase her diverse songwriting abilities, then Live In A Basement Apartment is proof Eden The Cat has all the potential to be someone the world recognizes as an artist with something meaningful to say. Most of the EP is comprised of stories that feel as if they were lifted from Eden’s own diary, with details big and small painting vivid images from life in a part of Canada far too few have experienced. That said, there is also something so incredibly universal about what Eden has to say. Her views on love, life, sex, and the crossroads between the three are often as brutally honest as any you could hope to come across, and you believe them because you can hear the conviction in her voice. She may be entertaining you with her art, but it’s clear it was created as a release for her. She needs the music as much as you want it, and that’s what makes it so great.

These day it seems like most singer-songwriters are a dime a dozen. Simply having a few good hooks and a moderate understanding of how your instrument works is no longer enough to win over coffee shop crowds, let alone the world at large. Standing out in this forever overcrowded genre requires that intangible ‘it’ factor, and I don’t know that we have encountered anyone in the last few years who embodies that indescribable quality better than Eden The Cat. With three releases in the last year alone, this Canadian is making a damn good argument for everyone to give her a bit of their time, and so far she has delivered nothing but quality work. Live In A Basement Apartment is yet another step forward in what is quickly becoming a career to watch, and I cannot wait to hear what she has in store for us when Funny Women arrives later this year.

SCORE: 9.5/10

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James Shotwell

James Shotwell is the founder of Under The Gun Review. He loves writing about music and movies almost as much as he loves his two fat cats. He's also the co-founder of Antique Records and the Marketing Coordinator for Haulix. You should probably follow him on Twitter.

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