Time and again, the cat has been catapulted to the status of symbolic emblem: in ancient Egypt, the cat represented Bast, goddess of both protection and perfume; in the 18th century, French printing apprentices slaughtered their mistress’s cats, a visual and visceral pun that hinted she was a harlot. In “Cat Faces”—from 2002’s Ugly Casanova’s Sharpen Your Teeth—Isaac Brock and company consider the cloud of connotations surrounding the cat, drearily and dreamily telling us that “you blame me and I’ll blame you, and we’re both right / Cutting cat faces in the pines.” The image remains illusory, as wistfully misty as the rest of the song, and so the cats are not an image indicative of this relationship, or this moment, or this anything, but a symbol of how difficult it is to determine the significance of any symbol. The cats, carved into the bark, carve out no particular meaning. They’ve been cut into the trees, and they’ll remain in the trees, as we shout and suffer and the “swallows drop in and dash the sky.” As we examine these markings, the cat faces turn to face us: watching them, they watch us, too, their eyes wooden and wary and unforgiving.

Of course, if the catacomb of cat tropes becomes too trying to navigate , we can always do as the Lucksmiths do, and just abdi-cat-e. From 1999’s Happy Secret, “Abdication!”—the most melancholically ironic exclamation point of all melancholically ironic exclamation points—is a slow, sweet giving up of the pretense that everybody hasn’t given up already. “You sounded so sure / That I’d come to your side when you came to your senses,” when all the catty preoccupations were past, but, it seems, you were wrong. It’s too late, it’s autumn and it’s cold again. Some things, the Lucksmiths suggest, we just aren’t meant to get a hold on; in the end, you just cat take it with you.

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