Cat Power

A body soft and lithe, a gaze that darts, dark brown. Every woman seeks her cat. Inside or outside herself. An arcane metaphor of the sacred and profane feminine. A simile already dear to Baudelaire and Verlaine. Or, even earlier, to the ancient Egyptians, devoted to the cult of Isis and Bastet, who could don the spirit and likeness of their beloved feline at will. Because deep down it's a timeless story. Like music. And, according to some, cats and music are the only ways to escape the ugliness of existence. Among them is surely Chan Marshall. Cherokee, Jewish and Irish blood in her veins. A "Ruby Tuesday" transplanted into the '90s, wandering barefoot through Central Park. A barefoot Cinderella at the grand ball of alternative music. A mist of freckles framing two eyes mottled with agate and metal, eyes rimmed with dark lids as thin as horsehair, eyes not yet accustomed to sight or armored against wonder. And her songs resemble her: small or great (sl)(w)eepwalking idylls that can't bend their extraordinary empathy to the servitude of traditional genres (country, blues, gospel) or contemporary ones (indie, grunge). "Cat" claws sunk into the heart of dormant litanies for opium eaters.

Hypnotic warbles, soliloquies steeped in sleep and sadness that use harmonies and accompaniments as emotional settings, shadowy and skittish rhythms, simple chords, sometimes barely sketched. Darkly poised between Nick Drake, Smog and Lisa Germano, Cat Power's music travels the greatest distance using the fewest means available.

"You Are Free" is the album that, five years on, completes the tripartite altarpiece of her masterpieces ("What Would The Community Think", 1995, and "Moonpix", 1998). Compared to its predecessor, there's a discernible attempt (not entirely successful, thankfully) to discipline her peripatetic imagination, reassembling it into the closed forms of rock music. The end of the beginning. For others, the beginning of the end.

Beyond certain moody speculations, though, the conversational tone is the same as ever, the torpid, austere intensity worthy of a classical work, the instrumentation pared to the essential (there's Dave Grohl on drums, Warren Ellis on violin, and Eddie Vedder, who on a couple of occasions joins her on backing vocals).

The glassy minimalist fixity of her piano lieder, sloshing two or three chords pounded by fingers cold as stalactites, "I Don't Blame You" (a parlour ballad streaked with blues and adorned with chorus and call-and-response in a boozy half-sleep), "Names" (sad mezzo-soprano inflections sedated by a monotonous strumming that sounds like a child practicing for a music recital), "Evolution" (in the briny solfeggio of her duet with Vedder), throw into relief, by contrast, the more virulent and turbulent songs: "Free", a caustic parody of a hippy/freak anthem, with the rough, repetitive staccato of her guitar, Grohl playing like a drum machine, and a sixties organ undertow; the indie-grunge of "Speak For Me", insistent distorted guitar riffs embroidered over a hymn-like chorus; the aggressive "Hewar", with the whirling, memorable jangle of its bridge and incisive piano counterpoints; and the martial "Shaking Paper", with its inlay of feedback drones and almost raga-like overtones, heartfelt and distant as the yawn of a sleepwalker suddenly waking on the edge of a precipice.

And if the country-soul of "Fool" (loping and pastoral), "Maybe Not" (a Tamla sound wrung dry of pain) and "Half For You" (the best of the lot, with gong, cymbals, rattles and faint sonic touches filtering in from the prompter's box) preludes the self-glorifying, sun-baked shores of "The Greatest" (2006), "Werewolf" is a spectral cowboy song ("uh, ah, yippie ya-ah"), pivoting on the duet between Cat's voice, screened and quavering, and the gothic violin of Ellis; "Good Woman", a feral country-blues (bolstered by Vedder's backing vocals and Ellis's cutting bow), sounds like an invocation or a curse to ward off the shadows nesting in her psyche; and "Babydoll", a Delta blues caught between dusk and dawn, honed sharp by feedback.

We truly feel for her detractors, but cats know instinctively who is a friend and who isn't, even if that doesn't push them to change their attitude towards either one. So, if the somewhat threadbare and elliptical hermeticism of the lyrics (with the exception of the simple, touching "Names" and "Werewolf", which is a cover anyway) remains her Achilles heel to this day, musically, in 2003, Cat Power had few equals. Perhaps the most complex and eminent singer-songwriter figure of the past decade.

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07/05/2008