Catlips Turns Chela's 'Handful of Gold' into a Bucketful of Rad

If you've wandered around Echo Park recently, you may have seen IHeartComix 1nfinity Records signee Chela practicing dance moves outside of various taco joints on Sunset Boulevard. It's a common occurrence. So much so that we though the Aussie bedroom pop songstress' video for "Handful of Gold," premiered on Noisey, was a documentary. It wasn't. Turns out it's just a cool music video.

The cut finds Chela bedecked in a sleeveless denim jacket with a Double Dragon-esque backpatch, twirling about with a posse of her scraggle-tastic homies and casually dropping another in a series of effortless pop jams that all bear the quintessentially Chel-ian vibe of Casiotone thrift-store 80s pop diva. Her ethos of "dance like nobody's watching, and then film it and make a music video"* is immediately disarming and charming. "I must be a slinky kinda cat," Chela tells THUMP. "I rehearsed a bunch of times to memorize the choreography, but I must say, the turn at the beginning came quite naturally."

Signed to Franki Chan's 1nfinity label, a counterpart to the multi-faceted IHeartComix brand, Chela's nestled in quite nicely to the Angeleno milieu, but she looked back to her homeland in search of a remixer for the tune. "Catlips is my galpal Katie who I met on a rooftop in our hometown Perth last year," Chela explains. "She's a slick beatmaker, with a mad history in crap rap. She's a sucker for a good 90's R&B tune, and she loves to dance. I think all of this comes out in her remix."

At first listen, we thought Chela's tunes might be a direct homage to the golden era of female fronted pop, but it's all a product of her own twisted mind. She didn't know who Debbie Gibson was! We decided to show her some videos. "How did I not know of this vintage diva?" Chela laughs. "She has some pretty classic videos. "Electric Youth" is my fave song so far, for the dance element. She kinda looks like Ladyhawke!"

Catlips' remix begins with bizarro-tropical house beat a bouncy bassline, and by the second time round, the synths have kicked in while spazz-pop glitches dip in and out all around. You can tell the two are from a similar school of musical appreciation. But enough about the music. Let's get to the (probably vegan) meat of things: "My favourite taco spot in LA is called Pinches Tacos," Chela spills the (refried) beans. "I don't bother eating Mexican in Australia because it can never compare."

Find Chela on Facebook // SoundCloud // Twitter // Pinches Tacos
Find Catlips on Facebook // SoundCloud

* I totally nicked this line from a YouTube comment