Cat’s Club
1190 Folsom Street (@ 8th)
T: (415) 431-3332
So you saw the musical as a child, wide-eyed with wonder, and ever since you’ve communed with your inner alley cat. You’re glamorous in that ragamuffin sorta chic. You think catty is a fashion look, not an insult, and your sleek new winter coat isn’t fur - it’s fake. Now you’ve discovered another scratching post and you’re itching, twitching to give it a rub.
The Cat’s Club, verily exuding its alley way mystic, has contrived a set-up infinitely more desirable than any dumpster décor. The scenery? Think funk and formality, like gold gilt and disco balls. The club is elongated and sectioned into two distinct rooms, each with a separate sound system. The front room acts as a glitzy precursor to the focal highlight: the show. The backroom soundstage, minimalist as a black box, hosts a weekly revolution of musical guests and theme parties.
The backroom’s warehouse functionality draws counterpoint to the mirrored velvet balancing the rather baroque anterior. Personally, I thought the layout spoke more to an underlying grit and musical rawness. Perhaps it's an idealistic pledge against the mass influx of the perfectly polished and produced? Whatever the ideology behind the barren walls, when the music starts flowing, true enough, it don’t matter. Any resemblance to an icebox cooler dissipates into the roving heat of the crowd (a mad moving organism if the rhythm’s good).
The sensual elements: the heat, the sound, the light streaked darkness, the scent of energy poised in air, fuse to create a powerful, pleasing sense of intimacy as if you’ve found something razor sharp and subterranean. There’s even a bar cornered in the rear of the room so you never need to leave the show. That is except, of course, to lovingly admire the mermaid goddess swimming hauntingly in the colored lights up front. If that siren doesn’t lure you to the Cat’s Club, the beats and cheap cover surely’s gotta pull.
Posthoc reviewed nights at Cat's Club:
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