Cat Terrones - Shelter In Our Beauty (2025)

Los Angeles native Cat Terrones grew up watching whales and swimming in the Pacific. That has given her a feel for the natural world that she hopes to bring into her songs. The album was worked on with her longtime collaborator, Ben Shannon, who plays guitar, sings harmony, and co-wrote several of the songs.

There is a feel of American primitive guitar about the way they play on the opening song, ‘Sun And Dark,’ so the second song, ‘Give Back Rain,’ comes as a bit of a surprise. Punchy Electric Guitar sections and Cello supplement the acoustic picking and very West Coast harmonies. The song itself is “a lament about sea-level rise penned just before the 100-year flood in Lyons, Colorado,” which is an interesting take for a landlocked state.

‘Ohio’ takes us back to an all-acoustic format but with a bigger band sound that covers banjo and fiddle, as well as the guitars. Terrones and Shannon’s voices combine particularly well in this song. When she sings solo on ‘Meadow Trail’, her voice has a deep, dark feel, which renders the words almost irrelevant as the voice becomes part of the instrumentation. With Shannon harmonising, the words come into focus.

‘Wildflower’ is “a siren song about living in balance with the earth and learning to heal from heartbreak with the help of the Mariposa Lily” and includes a fiddle solo that could as easily be Irish or Scottish folk music as West Coast American. She is at her best on acoustic songs like ‘Broken Promise Land’, where the voices blend over simple guitar figures. Producer Dave Hidek gives these quieter songs an intimacy and warmth. Cat Terrones often uses the word “lament” to describe her writing. ‘Carry You’ is a gem of a folk song, which builds through the verses, adding fiddle to the guitars as the song progresses.

The strongest song and also the lead single is ‘City Where She Sleeps.’ The most West Coast sounding of an album, which she describes as being “more rural than Laurel Canyon but more expansive than an Appalachian valley.” Just occasionally, that lets a couple of the songs down. Letting the songs breathe in simpler acoustic settings might work well. ‘Pacheco’ would have been better in that style, possibly, and it would be interesting to hear how she performs these live.

Overall, “Shelter In Our Beauty” is an interesting album, her first after 2 EPs, and there’s lots of promise for the future in her music.