About Down on Them by Paco Cathcart
Paco Cathcart’s Down on Them is the depiction of the beautiful and precarious life of an NYC underground musician from the perspective of a born and raised New Yorker. While skyrocketing NYC rent has pushed many independent creatives to other cities and towns, Paco has continued to hold it down by working countless freelance labor jobs over the years to make rent and to keep writing and recording in their treasured hometown. Moving their reel to reel from space to space, price-out to price-out, Paco has recorded over 50 albums under the name The Cradle. Their work has seen attention from outlets like Stereogum and Pitchfork, which called their album Bag of Holding, “fantastical, folky, and intensely imaginative.”
While Paco’s work has garnered attention from mainstream outlets from time to time, they continue to book their own shows, national tours and have self released the large majority of their catalogue. Paco has been a major contributor to and supporter of the independent underground, where they hold a dedicated following. They have inspired bands like Water From Your Eyes, recorded everyone from Palberta to Open Head and organized countless shows and events at DIY spaces. There is no other musician currently working in NYC that has been such a pillar to NYC DIY over the last 15 years. Theirs is a true dedication to DIY values, constantly in motion.
Down on Them is Paco’s first LP under their own name, and marks a turn toward a more high fidelity recording style. They had been dreaming of working with a crew of musicians capable of playing these songs and of putting them down in a studio environment. Paco found their ultimate wrecking crew in bassist Miriam Elhajli, Keyboardist Ellie Shannon, and Drummer Bailey Wollowitz. These are musicians not only capable of playing the often complicated interweaving parts in these songs, but also of singing harmony throughout them. The quartet toured the country working out the finer points of the arrangements before laying them down at Artifact Studios in Ridgewood, Queens. As Paco recounts the process of working with this band, “There's a powerful intimacy created through the shared ritual of consistent rehearsal, something that you can only find through slowing down and playing together over a long period of time.”
The songs on Down on Them are about resilience. There is often a focus on what it means to live in a city like NYC in 2025 with specific snapshots of terrain close to Paco’s heart, like their current Flatbush neighborhood and Jamaica Bay, one of Paco’s favorite bicycle excursions. Paco gives their take on everything from hyperbolic congestion (“Bottleneck Blues”) using to the Spotted Lantern Fly’s recent ubiquity (“Invasive Species”), which is used as a metaphor for gentrification. Paco also takes us to small spaces with intimate depictions of characters like the elderly woman in “Ella Vive Sola” who spends her hours alone, only occasionally speaking to her sister on the phone.
While Neil Young’s dark and forboding Ditch Trilogy is a sonic touchpoint, Down on Them does not wallow in even its’ heaviest moments, but rather finds a kind of delirious beauty in the city’s highs and lows. On first single “Bottleneck Blues” there is joy and acceptance in Paco’s vocal even as the over-density of city life is constantly encroaching. With all of its difficulties Paco is up for the challenge of living in NYC. “I want to swim with a rusted engine” they sing as only a true New Yorker could.
