Introduction

YOU ARE FREE (2003)
1) I Don't Blame You; 2) Free; 3) Good Woman; 4) Speak For Me; 5) Werewolf; 6) Fool; 7) He War; 8) Shaking Paper; 9) Babydoll; 10) Maybe Not; 11) Names; 12) Half Of You; 13) Keep On Runnin'; 14) Evolution.
The album sleeve, frankly speaking, reads You Are Cat Power Free, and I am not sure what that means — it is not likely that the LP was ever supposed to be her last, but perhaps one should un­derstand that figuratively, as in, «this is my first album that does not sound like quintessential Cat Power»? Because that would not be too far from the truth, or, rather, it does announce a new ap­proach to songwriting that I, for one, could only welcome: Chan Marshall embraces the pop for­mat, at least inasmuch as she begins to introduce recurrent hooks in her compositions.
I do not know what happened — perhaps the awfulness of The Covers Record struck the artist herself as too overtly egotistical and pointless, but it is a definite fact that You Are Free, despite the title, is the first album in Cat Power history where she agreed to let go of some of her free­dom, adopting a more precise, tight-cut formula that was still true to her post-nuclear melancholic spirit, but gave her the advantage of actually planting her mood swings deep in the listener's braincells, rather than just spinning them around like fluctuating satellites. Perhaps we should be thanking Adam Kasper, the producer of Pearl Jam and Queens Of The Stone Age, for helping Chan with selecting the songs — or Dave Grohl, who is playing bass or drums on some of these songs (and no, there's no threat of turning Chan into a Foo Fighter, although that could be interesting). Any­way, whatever the reason, this is Cat Power's most musically interesting album since... well, probably since one of her past lives, when she must have been High Priestess of the Temple of Bastet and wrote depressed prayers to feline spirits.
In terms of arrangements, not much has changed: for the most part, it is still just Chan and her acoustic guitar or solitary piano. Every once in a while, she is joined by Grohl, or by some strings (master orchestrator and Beck's father David Campbell lends a hand on two tracks), or by some background vocals (including a couple of turns by Eddie Vedder), but none of that suffices to take away the impression of yet another «quiet» album. The difference is that this time around, «quiet» is complemented by «tight» and «energetic», and you can see that from the very first track, ʽI Don't Blame Youʼ — it is just as minimalistic as anything on Covers Record (five notes piano riff, yes), but somehow it is also a bit more playful, and it has got a cool transition between verse and chorus — apparently, the song is dedicated to Kurt Cobain, and while its verses sound like a stern reprimand from an overbearing psychiatrist, the chorus rushes to reassure the patient that "I don't blame you", and what do you know? it looks like she really does not. But the song does not come across as a propaganda of suicide, either: in contrast to her earlier, proverbially depressed material, ʽI Don't Blame Youʼ is just full of empathy and compassion. It's not a great song, but it's a song (rather than just a musically enhanced stream of conscious), and it is com­pletely free of potential irritants.
Everything else is at least good, and sometimes quite inventive and at times, even funny in its own way — ʽFreeʼ, for instance, sounds like a cruelly deconstructed dance tune, maybe from the synth-pop era, only with acoustic guitar replacing synthesizer and an atmosphere of bizarre para­noidal apprehension replacing the «pseudo-original» atmosphere of cheesy romance. In addition, the line "don't fall in love with the autograph" should probably go down in history as one of the smartest and catchiest lines she's ever written. However, genre-wise, ʽFreeʼ is an exception: most of the tunes are still either bluesy or folksy in nature, and that's okay, since these genres come to her more naturally. It's just that before, she was unable to to anything particularly interesting with them — but now, with a little help from her friends...
...well, just listen to ʽGood Womanʼ: this is essentially a gospel-soul number about how "I don't want to be a bad woman / And I can't stand you to be a bad man" (I can easily see somebody of Aretha's caliber doing this), but she finds a cool combination of sounds to go along with it — distorted «grunge-folksy» guitar, David Campbell's string arrangement, and a couple of kids with ghostly effects for backing vocals. Again, no single great hook per se, but the arrangement gives the whole thing a multi-voice impression (guitar gruffness + string painfulness + kid voice ghost­liness), so put a check mark next to «intrigue» at least, not to mention huge progression since those days when such a song would simply have been recorded with distorted guitar and nothing else and would have ended up as «dead boring indie schlock».
Most of the tunes that follow have one or more quirky elements — ʽSpeak For Meʼ has several Chans bouncing off each other and a tense build-up from verse to bridge to chorus (I think it's a song about confusion and chaos in the modern world, but could just as well be about indigestion, whichever matters more to you emotionally); the cover of Michael Hurley's ʽWerewolfʼ is em­bellished by yet another of Campbell's imaginative orchestrations, so that simple folk is turned into subtle baroque pop; ʽFoolʼ is her take on alt-country, with two vocal tracks (one normal and one falsetto) superimposed on each other in a lovely sweet way which almost completely over­shadows the bitter words with which she stabs her compatriots ("it's all that we have, the USA is our daily bread / And no one is willing to share it"); ʽHe Warʼ is an odd mix of grunge, avant­garde, and maybe even hip-hop — a song that refuses to conform to any genre, while at the same time retaining an odd catchiness, not to mention the overall message that needs no lyrical confir­mations, given the song's title and the year of the album's release (2003); and so on.
Amazingly, there's something good to be said about every single tune here — I still feel that the melodies are way too minimalistic and the arrangements not stupendous enough for this stuff to reach, you now, the Brian Eno level of bliss or something, but the most important thing has been achieved: You Are Free sounds like light, naturally flowing, not overcooked melancholia that can be sensually enjoyed even without understanding a single word of her lyrics. Who knows, maybe she just had to hit that 30-year boundary to reach genuine artistic maturity; in any case, now she is able to make use of just four notes and just one Eddie Vedder to bring the album to a tender, hypnotic conclusion (ʽEvolutionʼ), and it must take absolute artistic maturity to be able to put Eddie Vedder to good use, so a big thumbs up here indeed.
THE GREATEST (2006)
1) The Greatest; 2) Living Proof; 3) Lived In Bars; 4) Could We; 5) Empty Shell; 6) Willie; 7) Where Is My Love; 8) The Moon; 9) Islands; 10) After It All; 11) Hate; 12) Love & Communication; 13*) Up And Gone; 14*) Dreams.
Yes, I totally agree that Cat Power makes unpredictable records — the only thing you can always predict is that the next one will be just as sad and introspective as the previous one, but as to the melodic content, arrangements, influences, they will be constantly reshuffled, as befits the pro­verbial Artist In Constant Search Of The Grail. The only problem is, you can also be sure that not every such combination will work. The many ingredients on You Are Free made it work better than anything she'd ever done before — and for her next album, she would make an even less predictable move: to Memphis, of all places. Considering that she was born and raised in Georgia, and allegedly traveled a lot through the South in her younger days (including a brief schooling peri­od in Memphis, among other locations), this «back to roots» thing may not seem too surpri­sing; but whether it did her any good is not clear.
The entire album, named after its first track (and I bet most people mistook it for a best-of com­pilation originally, which could at least partially account for the drastic increase in sales...), is a collection of generally slow, moody, piano- and acoustic-based country (or is that country-soul?) ballads — perfectly normal singer-songwriterish balladry, although Chan still hates the idea of a repetitive chorus, normally sung (with Chan's pretty, raspy, crackling voice rarely rising above or falling below mid-level volume) and normally played, as she enlists some local Memphis pros to assist her with the arrangements (the most famous of these is arguably Teenie Hodges, the long-time collaborator with Al Greene and the co-author of ʽTake Me To The Riverʼ). As unpredic­table as the decision is in general, you can still feel it ties in with her aesthetics — here we take old school R&B, soul, and country music, and reroute them to match the Cat Power vision, just as we did that with Delta blues and ʽSatisfactionʼ years ago.
Unfortunately, it also means a return to general boredom. Where You Are Free was an album of songs, The Greatest is an album of moods, or, rather, of one mood — the Cat Power mood, set up on the title track and gently (with just a subtle bit of turbulence) floating you all the way to the end. The pianos tinkle, the guitars punctuate, the strings glide, the rhythm section is underpaid, and, once again, there is not much beyond basic atmosphere, charisma, and «psychologism» to make the music linger on longer in your brain than the time it takes it to float by. For consisten­cy's sake, if I rarely have a good word to throw in about «commercial» country-tinged singer-songwriters with little musical talent, but a pretty face (and other body parts) to gain traction through video imagery, I honestly don't see how I could generate good words about an album like this — no better and no worse than literally thousands of such records, with the only difference being that «commercial» singer-songwriters at least try to write actual songs and fail, whereas Chan does not even try. Not this time, at least.
I suppose that the underlying artistic theme here is «humility», as we learn from the title track (formally a tale of an aspiring boxer, but an allegory is always an allegory): "Once I wanted to be the greatest... and then came the rush of the flood... Melt me down, into big black armour, leave no trace of grace, just in your honour...". I assume that "greatest" here does not imply simplistic fame and fortune, for which she never struggled in the first place, but rather just the basic desire to stand out from the rest — and now, it is as if she is acknowledging how wrong that was, and how preferable it is to be "melted down". This is nice, but, just like before, there is a contradiction, or, at least, an impasse: if this is so, I am automatically cleared of all responsibility for writing a negative review, because there's nothing like a negative review to help stabilize a sense of humility, and besides, if she no longer wants to be "the greatest", then how could a record of hers be "the greatest"?
With this logical problem on my mind, I find it hard to concentrate on any of the individual songs. There are tunes about loss, betrayal, and loneliness; a few about hatred; one grungy Neil Young-ian epic that could have been decent if it made at least a little effort to evolve and develop itself (ʽLove & Communicationʼ); a few deconstructions of classic folk and country patterns (for Cat Power, deconstructing a song is always understood literally — as in, when instead of transporting a boombox, you take all of it apart and carry all the individual parts and bolts in a bundle, for no reason other than you like being all encumbered and messy); and maybe just a few sonic gim­micks here and there (the brass fanfare on ʽCould Weʼ, the nonchalant whistling on ʽAfter It Allʼ) that can serve as delimiters between tracks, just because your tired mind cannot seek out any others. And, of course, if you really so desire, you can burrow deep inside and feast on subtlety after subtlety — but then be sure to make room for those hundreds of singer-songwriters, cruelly bypassed by critical fame, who would very much like to claim that they can be just as subtle, only they never thought about claiming to be the carriers of Cat Power.
In short, she's back to her usual tricks, except this time, doing it in such an accessible manner that using the album as background muzak would be a perfectly easy task for just about anybody living in the quiet world of easy listening / adult contemporary / neo-country etc. Conversely, this is the reason why I don't give it a thumbs down — the album raises no negative emotion what­soever, and with all this professional musicianship, and with Chan using her voice in a wise and restricted manner, it is pleasant and, dare I say this, intelligent background muzak. But it does not succeed in involving me on any serious emotional level, and its amorphousness is quite a bitchin' disappointment after the tight focus and shapefulness of You Are Free. Oh well, at least I hope those Memphis musicians were well paid for their work, however aimless it may have been.
JUKEBOX (2008)
1) New York; 2) Ramblin' (Wo)man; 3) Metal Heart; 4) Silver Stallion; 5) Aretha, Sing One For Me; 6) Lost Some­one; 7) Lord, Help The Poor And Needy; 8) I Believe In You; 9) Song To Bobby; 10) Don't Explain; 11) Woman Left Lonely; 12) Blue; 13*) I Feel; 14*) Naked, If I Want To; 15*) Breathless; 16*) Angelitos Negros; 17*) She's Got You.
You can probably tell that if I had few kind words to say about Marshall's first album of cover tunes, the chances of these kind words multiplying tenfold for her second album of cover tunes would seem to be pretty thin. But at the very least, you couldn't blame her for completely repea­ting herself: whereas The Covers Record was totally minimalistic, consisting of little other than Marshall and her guitar or piano, Jukebox features Cat Power at the head of the «Dirty Delta Blues Band», consisting of several professional musicians assembled from various outfits (such as guitarist Judah Bauer of Jon Spencer's Blues Explosion), and, consequently, offering mostly bluesy reworkings of the usual near-random assortment of both golden and forgotten oldies.
Yet the album is still dominated by her usual tricks — take a certain song's lyrics, throw out the repetitive elements, destroy the original melody, and offer some atmospheric sonic brooding in its place. Maybe few of us are huge fans of the original ʽNew York, New Yorkʼ as done by Liza Minelli, and would not mind see it so viciously deconstructed (essentially, turned into a slow, funky blues jam), but even if the move works as an artistic statement (take a joyful ode to moving to the big city and turn it into a grimmer-than-grim hangover reaction to the whole thing), it hardly works as an autonomous atmospheric performance in its own rights — the music that they play, actually, is boring as heck.
And then, rinse and repeat twelve times in a row — seventeen, actually, if you consider the ex­panded two-disc edition that throws on five more outtakes from the same sessions (and I do be­lieve there's also an additional EP out there that adds even more). If you like this underground lounge atmosphere, with dark, quivering basslines and wobbly, subconsciously dangerous elec­tric pianos all over the place, good for you, but I'm still looking for melody and not finding it any­where. Dylan's ʽI Believe In Youʼ arguably gets the royal treatment, with a very heavy drum sound and a good mix of distortion and echo on the guitar, so it is a bit of a standout, but I still cannot take it any more seriously than anything else on here.
Like all the rest of her failures, Jukebox fails because even if the artist herself believes that she is making some sort of strong statement, she cannot impress that feeling on me. These arrange­ments are simply not interesting — maybe this is not generic adult-oriented sterile blues playing, but it's the next worst thing: «tasteful» blues jamming without any spark, where you just have the blues ambience, but not the blues technique or the blues punch. And the idea of converting everything to the same common denominator of this blues ambience is never properly cleared up. I can't even tell if she likes Hank Williams or Billie Holiday — it's just that the idea of treating them this way reeks of pointless pretentiousness and presumptiousness.
And then there is the album's only original: ʽSong To Bobbyʼ, an acoustic folk ballad about you-know-who, clearly patterned after his own ʽSong To Woodyʼ on his debut album. When Dylan did that, it was sure as hell presumptious (in a way, you could surmise that he was appointing himself as Guthrie's successor), but the presumption, as everybody could see quite soon, was justified. So is Chan Marshall now appointing herself as Dylan's successor? The lyrics of the song seem so worshipful and fanboyish that no, this is more of a case of here saying "I'm not worthy!" But is there a point in saying that, either? We already know, more or less, that Chan Marshall is not the next Dylan, nor is she the first female Dylan (Dylan-ess?). So... either it's arrogance or it's pointlessness, I really don't care.
To recapitulate — there is nothing here but a meta-concept that is as old as Chan Marshall's career on the whole (ʽYesterday Is Hereʼ from the debut album could have easily made it to this collection as well), and a lot of fuzzy, soporific bluesy atmosphere; honestly, I'd rather go listen to Susan Tedeschi. She's boring, too, but at least she's a goddamn musician, and she wouldn't dare eviscerate the blues idiom in order to stuff her Artistic Personality in its smelly carcass and make people pay money for it. Thumbs down.
SUN (2012)
1) Cherokee; 2) Sun; 3) Ruin; 4) 3,6,9; 5) Always On My Own; 6) Real Life; 7) Human Being; 8) Manhattan; 9) Silent Machine; 10) Nothin But Time; 11) Peace And Love.
I don't really know what it is that makes so many analog-reared artists these days to convert to electronica sooner or later — apparently, there's this idea floating around in the air that playing guitars and pianos is «so 20th century», and that there's no way you can avoid electronic sound generation and programmed patterns if you want to stare into the future rather than stagnate in the past. Apparently, this idea is much stronger than the reminder that electronic music is a product of the 20th century, and that way too many «electronic escapades» of modern indie artists end up sounding even more retro (for instance, hearken all the way back to 1980's synth-pop) than what­ever they were doing prior to that. In other words, electronic music as the key to the future is no longer a win-only option — these days, it's just another way of preserving the status quo.
Still, I guess that in the case of Cat Power anything works that can lead the artist away from another puddle of depressed, minimalistic, unmemorable streams of conscious and towards a more concise melodic shape for her compositions — and, luckily for us all, her embrace of elec­tronic beats and pulses managed to put her back on the same track that made You Are Free such a satisfactory experience. Most of these songs she recorded all by herself, only utilizing musi­cians from Jukebox's «Dirty Delta Blues Band» on a couple of tracks; but there are quite a few acoustic overdubs as well, clothing the electronic skeletons, and the mix is very tasteful. Honest­ly, she is not just embracing electronics because it is the trendy thing to do — or if she does, she at least manages to coax such sounds out of all her synthesizers and computers so as to agree with her emotional constitution: dark, paranoid, psychic textures all around.
A good example is the title track — uninteresting drum machine beat aside, the harsh, grey synth canvas, reminding of an endless cloud front swooping across the sky, make a cool contrast with the opening "here comes, here comes, here comes the Sun", clearly an allusion to George Harri­son but with the meaning reversed: in this song, the coming of the Sun seems to rather mean "the end of the world" than the hope of redemption and salvation, as she sings about the distant period in time when the Sun is expected to expand and burn down all life on Earth. The song's quietly dramatic flavor is enhanced with several layers of electronics and overdubs of background vocals, and it works in a Dead Can Dance sort of way, even though the overall sonic combination is much simpler (after all, Chan Marshall is not really a studio tech wiz, and for her first serious experience in harnessing complex studio technologies, this is a great success).
Elsewhere, she relies on electronics as the backbone for a dance-oriented experience: ʽ3,6,9ʼ combines elements of trip-hop and hip-hop (as well as a bit of a nursery rhyme for the chorus), but everything is still infused with the Cat Power atmosphere, as she (fortunately) makes no effort to get into tough street rapping, but simply applies her usual tired, brooding, "been-to-hell-and-back" voice to the new pattern — and it ain't great, but it works. ʽReal Lifeʼ also features her half-singing, half-rapping, but without betraying the usual vocal timbre and intonation, although I am not sure if I like the somewhat «preaching» attitude she takes on here, energized with all the heavy beats ("sometimes you gotta do what you don't want to do / to get away with an unordinary life" — really?). But somehow these things never sound irritating — on the contrary, there's something enchanting about how she manages to marry these conventional dance practices with closeted, introspective brooding.
The songs that got most of the attention, having been released as singles, are actually the ones that are least dependent on electronics and feature her backing band — ʽRuinʼ and ʽCherokeeʼ. The former is a universalist Cassandra-style lament about the ultimate fate of human society, spinning atop an enticing piano riff that sounds as if it was sampled from a ballroom version of ʽLa Cucarachaʼ and then, in the chorus, riding a good old disco bassline, which, of course, makes the repetitive chorus lyrics ("what are we doing? we're sitting on a ruin!") even more ironic. Like­wise, ʽCherokeeʼ is also built on a contrast — a song of love and death, all echoey pianos and high-soaring wailing guitar trills, with an unforgettable chorus of "bury me, marry me to the sky" (an invocation where both parts have to be understood as semantically equivalent — thus, love and death are actually the same thing, if it's sexy enough for you). I think we could all have a good grin at the deadly seriousness and pretentiousness of the song, but it pulls me in by means of sheer craft — I really like how the guitars, pianos, and vocals mesh together, and the impres­sion can be interpreted as romance or mourning or both at the same time, and the bottomline is, if the music totally matches the lyrics, everything about the lyrics is forgivable.
The album's conceptually simplest song also happens to be its longest — ʽNothin But Timeʼ, a song of unexpected hope addressed to the younger generation ("you ain't got nothing' else but time, and they ain't got nothin' on you... your world is just beginning"), strolls on for 11 minutes at the same tempo and on top of the same two-note piano melody. I am not sure why (particular­ly about the instrumental coda — for some reason, after the song fades out around a still reasonable seven-minute mark, it just has to come back again and drive that riff even deeper in your skull for an extra four minutes), but I do like the arrangement and the surprising optimism in the chorus: it is almost as if, after having preached about the end of the world as we know it and her own morta­lity and the impossibility to resolve any problems for so long, she wants to leave us with one big "Well, it's all curtains for me and for you, but let's at least leave some hope for the little children" — and I'm fine with that. The amusing extra note here is that she invites Iggy Pop to help her out with the chorus harmonies, and he makes the best of his melodic baritone to join her in a fit of tenderness. Yes indeed, there's no one out there like old Iggy to wish for a brighter future for our children.
The record does end on a more grown-up note, though: ʽPeace And Loveʼ, another piece of paranoid, half-sung, half-rapped electronic rock, seems to push forward an agenda of "grown-up, progressive hippieism" ("I'm a lover but I'm in it to win"), and, again, it does this in a musically intelligent way — the hookline is a repetitive string of "na-na-na-na"'s, just the kind of thing you'd expect from some old Flower Power band, but they're sung in a minor key and the whole thing sounds like a troubled warning to mankind... as does this entire album, as a matter of fact. It may be called Sun, and there might be a rainbow coming through that front sleeve, but it is still only trying to break out from the darkened sky, and the expression on that face is anything but conventionally «sunny». The good news is, this is one more of those few albums in her catalog where she really comes across as a musician with a strong personality, not as a personality with weak musicianship — so if electronics continues to be this good to her, bring it on. For the record, it did take me a few listens to get warmed up to this new twist, so the thumbs up rating is a bit hard-earned; but it does feel good, you know, when repeated listens eventually lead to satisfaction of the senses, rather than dumb frustration.

CATHERINE WHEEL