CAT POWER: WHAT WOULD THE COMMUNITY THINK (1996)
1) In This Hole; 2) Good Clean
Fun; 3) What Would The Community Think; 4) Nude As The News; 5) They Tell Me;
6) Taking People; 7) Fate Of The Human Carbine; 8) King Rides By; 9)
Bathysphere; 10) Water & Air; 11) Enough; 12) The Coat Is Always On.
Well, I certainly cannot vouch for the
community, but I think that Chan
Marshall's third album is a definite improvement on the first two — unfortunately,
still not nearly enough to make me experience it as a piece of music rather
than a series of dramatic monologues delivered in quasi-musical form. She's
almost getting there: the production is cleaner, the musical influences get
more diverse, and a small bunch of the tracks show signs of distinguishable
melodies, although there's nothing particularly curious or outstanding about
them. However, it's really not about the music, it's more of a «okay, for this
particular text and mood I'd need some country flavor», «this is a pissed-off
manifesto that requires a bit of grungy guitar», «here I'm being icily somnambulant,
so just a few quiet acoustic chords will do» etc. sort of a thing.
The progression is most obviously sensed when
you compare the original recording of ʽEnoughʼ with the new version on this
album — the acoustic melody is more complex and focused, the drums add extra
punch, the vocals are more disciplined and singing-oriented; the essence, however,
stays precisely the same, so essentially the difference is simply that we're
moving into the world of hi-fi from the world of lo-fi, which is almost always
a plus in my opinion (I'd say that in indie rock, there is maybe one case out
of a hundred when the lo-fi approach truly works better than a hi-fi one), but
compositional progress is still non-existent.
As for the atmosphere, well, extra cleanness of
sound has not influenced it one bit. Remember, in the previous review, I'd
already said that the simplest impression that Cat Power music gives us is that
of the last survivor walking around the ruins in a post-nuclear world? Well,
that feeling certainly does not dissipate once you hear the femme fatale
muttering "After this there will be no one, after this there will be no
one" to the sound of a dark folk acoustic guitar on ʽGood Clean Funʼ. Of
course, when you start drilling the lyrics, you realize that she is really
singing about a breakup (not a surprise), but honestly, I'd rather not start drilling the lyrics. The good
news is, she manages to conjure a kind of gothic atmosphere without formally
sounding gothic, and as for the lyrics, either I'm too culturally backwards to
get their greatness or they are, in
fact, merely a stream of conscious where a small handful of brilliant lines has
to be picked out of a huge amount of meaningless, association-less verbal chaff
("after this there will be hats on different bodies, after this there will
be no more beautiful dresses" certainly sounds like chaff to me).
The most «important» track on the album, chosen
for release as a single and also accompanied by the singer's first ever music
video, was ʽNude As The Newsʼ, apparently dealing with memories of an abortion
she had in 1992 — another good subject to wrap up in a desensitized
post-nuclear atmospheric blanket. The song does have arguably the most
memorable chorus on the album — the plaintive "Jackson, Jesse, I've got a
son in me!"; apparently, «Jackson» and «Jesse» are the names of Patti
Smith's children, so the ensuing "he's related to you, he's waiting to
meet you" is supposed to emphasize the spiritual closeness between Chan
and Patti (yes, as if we needed yet another
confirmation of the obvious fact that Chan Marshall worships at the altar of P.
S.). The overall sentiment is one of sorrowful guilt, though she never blames
herself explicitly, and there's a kind of strained tension in the song that
really puts it on top of everything else — yet, at the same time, something
still turns me off. Maybe it's the generic whiney overtones that appear in her voice
every time she raises it to a painful scream; in such moments, she's not that different from your average
Courtney Love, I'd say.
The voice may actually be a bigger problem —
now that the production is cleaner and overall muddiness of the sound is no
longer an acceptable excuse, tunes that rely almost exclusively on the alleged
hypnotic qualities of the lady's voice (like the two-chord folk-blues vamp of
ʽThey Tell Meʼ) will depend on whether you are ready to forgive her rather
ordinary timbre, her complete lack of vocal training, and her impaired ability
to sustain high notes because of the, you know, verbally undescribable magic in the way she strings those corrupted
notes together. Personally, I confess to occasionally cringing when she bums
one of these high notes (ʽWater & Airʼ is particularly awful in that
respect), and actually prefer those tunes that are more fully arranged, so
there's at least something between
her «raw» vocalizing and my ears (as in the peaceful alt-rocker ʽTaking Peopleʼ,
with its loud rhythm section). Even that does not always help: ʽWater &
Airʼ, for instance, has an experimental scrapy cello part in the place of a
lead counter-melody, but the screechy vocals still ruin the song whenever they
can — and on the cover of Bill Calahan's ʽBathysphereʼ, there's a weird
bleeping synth pattern superimposed on the acoustic rhythm (why? does it have
anything to do with the functioning of the bathysphere?), which throws in a
novelty component, but when she goes falsetto (actually, crack-hiss-falsetto) on
"set me free", I just don't care any more. Novelty or not, lady, but
with dirty tricks like these, you're not really fit to step into the shoes of
Patti Smith.
Overall, there's definitely some progress here,
but it's a bit like trying to improve on an old B-movie by remastering it in
high definition — so now you have all its pluses and all its minuses in much clearer focus. A record that shows
potential, sure enough, and space for improvement, and some talent and some
creativity and some genuine atmospherics, yet certainly not the masterpiece of
contemporary sonic art that the trendy hip people would have been looking for
in 1996. Again, the only thing that really makes me happy here is that she
could have very easily remained fully wedged in this formula — surely there'd
be enough happy people to lap it up for half a dozen more times with exactly
the same ingredients — yet she did not, and so on we go.
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