Beautiful Sharks


Beautiful Sharks is the second studio album by Australian band Something for Kate, released in June 1999. It marked a change in musical direction for the band, employing interesting and unconventional chord progressions and production. Sounding more sparse and open than their intense debut effort, the album produced four singles: "Electricity", "Whatever You Want", "The Astronaut" and "Hallways". It also had a limited edition release as a two-CD package, with multimedia content on the second disc. At the ARIA Music Awards of 2001, the album was nominated for Best Adult Alternative Album.
It was the first album recorded with bass player Stephanie Ashworth, although some b-sides released at the time were from recording sessions with Toby Ralph on bass.
Explaining the album title, frontman and songwriter Paul Dempsey said: "I guess the reason I put the two words together it because the shark is an animal that is both beautiful and graceful, but it will turn around and bite you. The theme of the album has a lot to do with humans and the technology we've created and where we're heading. It's beautiful, it's wonderful what we've created for ourselves, but it is going to turn around and bite us."
He said the first single, "Electricity", was about energy: "I wish sometimes that I was a pulse of energy … I'm always moving too fast for myself. Nothing's happening quick enough for me, I've always got about 500 things that I want to be doing. That's the thing behind 'Electricity'—I want to anticipate things before they happen. It's about movement and energy and speed, wanting to be a pulse of energy rather than being constrained by physics and flesh and bone."

Track listing

  1. "Whatever You Want" – 3.53
  2. "Hallways" – 3:03
  3. "Beautiful Sharks" – 3:57
  4. "Electricity" – 3:50
  5. "Big Screen Television" – 4:33
  6. "The Astronaut" – 3:42
  7. "Easy" – 4:26
  8. "Slowdance" – 4:35
  9. "Before Butterfly's Wings" – 4:23
  10. "Anchorman" – 4:54
  11. "Back to You" – 3:57
  12. "Photograph" – 3:38

    Charts

Certifications

Personnel