Cat
Power
Berbati's
Pan
231 SW Ankeny St., 248-4579
10 pm Saturday,
May 6
$10
sidebar:
A sort-of sonnet for Cat Power
The
Covers Record
(Matador)
Of related interest: Sinéad O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor
"Chan" is pronounced like "Sean."
Cat Power's other
albums: Moon Pix
('98), What Would the Community Think ('96).
Marshall lived in Portland for a short time several years
ago. Last May, she performed her own live score to Carl
Dreyer's silent film masterpiece Joan of Arc to a
packed house at Berbati's.
It was very late at night in New Orleans, a time and place
that work together particularly well.
I stood on a balcony in the Garden District. A fat silken
cat played atop the wrought-iron railing. Behind me, two
doors opened into a bright, dusty apartment. The other people
in the house had retired to bed, though some fugitive animal
sighs seemed to indicate they hadn't fallen asleep yet.
A milky Gulf wind buffeted the neighborhood with competing
smells of blooming flowers and rotting everything-else,
rattling the stiff fibrous leaves of the subtropical tree
invading the balcony from the next yard over.
Grey-white clouds did the Rorschach in front of a moon
just a little thicker than a crescent.
Down the block, a mud-colored Cadillac barge pulled up
to the curb, stopped, killed its lights. No one got out.
This is sort of what the new Cat Power record is like.
Chan Marshall, the midnight-voiced daughter of the South
doing business as Cat Power, has recorded three luminous
albums, all sopping with Gothic Dixie dread, propelled by
a lunar power of Marshall's own invention. These albums
seem to report on brutal acts, raw desire, desperate crimes
and doomed love--all far away, on another planet, in another
century or behind closed doors.
This otherworldly quality has become one of Marshall's
calling cards; her notorious stage fright, unfortunately,
is the other. The childlike horror with which she regards
playing live has become a part of her identity as an artist.
Her stage freak-outs now seem as inevitable as James Brown's
trademark mid-set collapse. Her quirk has come to overshadow
her quality.
In a just musical world, The Covers Record--her
new album of songs written by others--would let her say
goodbye to all that. It has the gauzy focus and sleepwalker's
pace of a nightmare, but the Southern twang at the edge
of Marshall's voice lends every song the grit of a murder
ballad. It may crib from songwriters ranging from Jagger
& Richards to Moby Grape's Jerry Miller, but The
Covers Record packs revelations all its own.
Take Marshall's lope through "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction."
The original, of course, is all Swinging London sass and
boy-rock bristle. Marshall strip-searches the song to find
its naked core of want and need, dispensing with every flourish
(and the iconic chorus, for that matter). Over skeletal
guitar chords, her ghostly voice turns the Stones' blue-balls
frustration into sensuous, miserable existential blues.
The angst conjured in those three minutes keeps the rest
of the album in its unbroken grip. Other songs cry for love,
mourn crushing departures and even, on Dylan's "Paths of
Victory," hint at redemption. Some songs are reimagined
pop, others are sea-salt traditionals. Marshall turns them
all into fire and ice.
Down in New Orleans, I met this guy Constantine--"like
the emperor," as he put it. He's German and he always wears
suits, and when he likes something very much, he describes
it with a phrase that I think fits The Covers Record
perfectly.
"Oh, man," he'll say. "It's a hideous masterpiece. A real
hideous masterpiece, I tell you."
A SORT-OF SONNET FOR CAT POWER (with apologies to
Will S.)
Shall I compare Cat Power to a rainy day?
She is more stormy and more distemperate:
Sunny shines do not shake Chan Marshall anyway,
even when she freaks out playing a date:
Sometimes you can't see her eyes for the hair,
and she looks like Todd Rundgren to me;
And every song to song makes us feel so bare;
By chance this happens to you, si?
But thy eternal storm shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that certain starkness,
Nor shall Life brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in mossy groups fans wait in darkness;
So long as girls can swoon, or guys can scat,
So long lives Chan, and this gives life to Cat.
--Caryn B. Brooks
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 26,
2000
|
