Time is finally right for Alpha Cat’s ‘Pearl Harbor’ | Testa - NJ.com

Alpha Cat’s 2001 album “Pearl Harbor,” which will be re-released on Wednesday, Feb. 17, by Aquamarine Records, has a backstory that’s as compelling as it is macabre.

Singer-songwriter Elizabeth McCullough was living in Jersey City when she formed the band Alpha Cat in 1999. After a successful gig on Dec. 7 of that year, she decided to write a song called “Pearl Harbor,” in honor of Pearl Harbor Day, that would become the title track of an album. 

The final masters of that album were delivered to her record label in Los Angeles on Sept. 10, 2001. Her flight back to New York proved to be the last to land at LaGuardia Airport just as the first plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center -- on the day that would become known as 9/11.

“Aside from the fact that there was an exploded bomb from WWII on the cover and its unfortunate title, there was something few even realized at the time of (’Pearl Harbor’s’) initial, long planned release,” McCullough recalled. “It contained sound effects of a glass building falling down. This was all simply too much for radio to even acknowledge the record, let alone play it. And this despite the fact that the theme was actually perfect -- a journey through darkness back to light. But people couldn’t get past the cover, and so after all that work, by everyone involved, it essentially fell to the scrap heap of history.”

In August 2019, as McCullough prepared for the release of Alpha Cat’s “Thatched Roof Glass House” album, she decided “Pearl Harbor” deserved a second chance and resolved to re-release it. But then COVID shut down virtually everything, including the music industry. In the interim, McCullough discovered a demo tape from 1994-1995, a time when her heart had been seriously broken by a failed relationship, and she decided that two of those songs belonged on the album, too.

Before deciding to try her hand at music, McCullough worked as a professional photographer and chronicled many of the groundbreaking bands of the 1980s, including Hoboken’s Bongos. When former Bongo Jim Mastro needed photos for his band Health & Happiness Show, he wound up introducing McCullough to two members of Television, Richard Lloyd and Fred Smith. Lloyd wound up playing on McCullough’s first studio demo, and Smith would produce the album now being released as “Pearl Harbor 2020.”

Even 20 years ago, “Pearl Harbor” would have sounded nostalgic, if not retro. In 2021, it feels like an artifact unearthed from a time capsule.

Remember, this album was originally released at a time when NYC rock music had turned jittery, brittle and angular – think the Strokes, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem. Alpha Cats’s warm tones, laid back rhythms, and frequent guitar solos hearken back to the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.  McCullough’s vocals, often jazz-tinged and dreamy, recall the young Joni Mitchell and Nancy Jeffries, singer of the seminal ‘70s Hoboken group The Insect Trust.

McCullough returns to the same themes throughout “Pearl Harbor” -- that love is something we can survive, that healing is something we all need, that there’s always daylight on the other side of the darkest emotions. 

“Can’t figure it out, can’t figure it out,” she sings about a relationship on “Once Upon a Time.” In the dismissive “Monster (can’t figure it out),” she complains, “you expect me to listen, but all you do is stay.”

There’s a bridge-and-tunnel romance on “Across the River Twice,” when McCullough sadly notes, “Right now Brooklyn seems so far away” from her Jersey City apartment. 

Even the seemingly optimistic “All Mine” tells another tale; the slow-paced threnody laments, “the only choices left are mine, mine, mine, responsibility is mine, mine, mine.”

The title track proves revelatory; how does one write a love song about Pearl Harbor? In her liner notes, McCullough noted that the music was written and arranged for “Pearl Harbor” before she had a single lyric or a title. Then two things happened; she was badly treated in a relationship by a status-seeking musician boyfriend, and a roommate tragically died.

McCullough recalls the details in the album’s liner notes: “As he was drunkenly exiting the PATH train in the wee hours of the morning, his bag got caught on the train handle as it left the 14th Street station. And after running alongside it as horrified passengers looked on, calling to the conductor to STOP!!! -- he met his end when he hit the signal light as the train entered the tunnel.”

“Pearl Harbor” has the undulating intensity and melodicism of classic Fleetwood Mac, as it ruefully dissects a failed and abusive relationship, using the infamous Japanese attack as a metaphor.  

“How did you find me, my Pearl Harbor, you caught me unaware,” McCullough sings. “Pulled me out of the water while I flailed wildly in my ocean / you were coming at me from above ...”

The two bonus demos, remastered from old cassettes, include “(Something Having to Do With) Spring,” a simple love song with acoustic guitar accompaniment, and “Love With What You’ve Got,” a song that details the consequences of that relationship.

McCullough, in her liner notes, stated that the “perfect storm” of 2020 has forced a reckoning and a transformation in all of us, which led her to believe that the time had finally arrived for the world to hear this album. And maybe, she added, “there’s even a treasure at the end of all of this, if we choose to look for it.” 

“Pearl Harbor 2020″ will be available at alphacat.band on Wednesday, Feb. 17.

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