Jolt Country

In the fall of 1999 I was working as a federal contractor, traveling around the country and patching aging networks in preparation for y2k. All that time, whether it was spent in a plane, a car, or a hotel room, gave me a lot of time to listen to music. Just a few years prior I was still discovering new music primarily through MTV. Suddenly there was this thing called the internet where I was discovering new bands faster than I could buy their albums. While I was fixing computers to prevent one potential disaster, that same fall a different disaster, Napster, was headed toward the music industry.

While I was zoom around the country, the band Kittie -- or as I recently found out, one of Kittie's multiple lineups -- were holed up in a studio, recording their debut album, Spit. None of the members of the band were 18 years old yet. Two of them weren't even old enough drive. The band got their sound from the albums they grew up listening to when they were kids -- mostly nu metal bands of the mid-90s like Korn, the Deftones, and Helmet. It's easy to forget how young the members of Kittie were.

In 2018, Kittie released Kittie: Origins/Evolutions, a DVD/CD combo that includes this documentary along with a live CD of their greatest hits. I'm not a big enough fan of the band to purchase the documentary, but as many of you know I'll watch just about anything, and so when the film popped up on Tubi for free, I decided to brush up on my Kittie knowledge by watching this concise, 90-minute documentary that covers the entire history of the band from soup to (no) nuts.

Nobody's interested in the details, so here's the shortest summary I could come up with. The band was formed in London, Ontario by Morgan Lander on guitars/vocals and her sister Mercedes on drums. The sisters found two like-minded girls to join them. Between the time the album was launched and it was time to shoot a video, one of the girls had already left. After the first tour, the other one did. A second guitarist was added, and later quit. A bass player arrived, developed anorexia, and quit. A new bass player got married in America which made getting a visa in Canada difficult, and left after a tour. Rinse and repeat from 2000 all the way through 2018, the year the film was released. In 2012, Trish Doan (the band's former bass player who had developed an eating disorder) rejoined Kittie and the band was talking about what the future held. Between the filming of the documentary and its release, Trish Doan took her own life, apparently taking the band with her.

Kittie's first two albums were definitely rooted in nu metal, and that, along with the band's goth-heavy image, made them easy to market. As the sisters and their compadres began to explore different musical styles, nobody in the industry knew what to do with them. This resulted in a discography that was both eclectic, which doesn't always translate to sales. The band gained exposure by co-headlining Ozzfest and performing at other major festivals, but at a time when the band needed sales to stay afloat in the business, they tapped into a fanbase that was tapped into Napster. Sales dropped as the band went to the top of Napster's charts. The band's last studio release was in 2011. Morgan took a marketing job for a fitness chain; Mercedes became a real estate agent.

In 2017 to celebrate the release of this documentary, the band performed a reunion show with several of the band's previous lineups taking the stage for different eras. After the passing of bassist Doan, the band essentially broke up. In 2019 Morgan Lander said it was unlikely that the band would move forward without Doan, and in October of 2020 Mercedes said that it was unlikely that Kittie would reunite to perform again "without a significant financial offer." Apparently that offer arrived; last week, Kittie announced three performances at the When We Were Young festival scheduled to take place in Las Vegas in the fall of 2022. Time and money heals all wounds.

Link: https://tubitv.com/movies/501451/kittie-origins-evolutions