SJ Esau: Wrong Faced Cat Feed Collapse

There’s a revolution going on in bedrooms all over Bristol, England. There, musicians, buddies, and the guy who sells coffee down the street are arming themselves with tape recorders and documenting their experiences in song.

For years, Sam Wisternoff, AKA SJ Esau, has been working in this DIY tradition—constructing songs by looping tape hiss, cat purrs, bonks, and melodies into experimental pop portraits and carefully constructed freak-outs. Wrong Faced Cat Feed Collapse (Anticon) sounds significantly cleaned-up and properly mastered, but no less bizarre or imaginative.

Over the course of the album, SJ Esau tackles pastoral folk about a cat who has no balls, sung in a way that sounds touching. This erupts into Celtic rock chaos - large chunks of directive jamming that never get boring and dreamt-up lyrical non-sequiturs scored by clarinet, fiddle, strums, and taps taped together with sound loops.

Best is the folk elegy “Queezy Beliefs,” which gives a name to faith of the uncertain and our collective confusion, and “All Agog,” in which SJ Esau tightly packs each second with perfectly composed blips, elastic pings, and - believe it or not - a first-rate melody.

SJ Esau skillfully marries mental experimental tendencies and twisted, sometimes melodic folk in the style of Pavement or Silver Jews. His tunes are part careful construction, part on-the-fly inspiration. As he sings, “it’s all in bits and pieces in the wrong order,” it somehow splendidly makes sense.

- Kristin Grayewski
SJ Esau (Anticon)