Cat Power: Wanderer

CAT POWER: WANDERER (2018)

1) Wanderer; 2) In Your Face; 3) You Get; 4) Woman; 5) Horizon; 6) Stay; 7) Black; 8) Robbin Hood; 9) Nothing Really Matters; 10) Me Voy; 11) Wanderer / Exit.

General verdict: Sympathetic, but annoyingly vague and melodically unmemorable, confessions of an innovative-cum-traditional singer-songwriter.

The six-year interval between Sun and Wanderer had to do with Marshallʼs family matters (childbirth) and health issues (she was diagnosed with hereditary angioedema, a disease almost as nasty as it is unpronounceable), but also with a conflict between her and her old label, Matador Records. Allegedly, as she tells the story herself, the label was displeased about her not being able or willing to churn out «hits» — to the point where, at one time, she was presented with Adeleʼs 25 and told that this is how you make a record nowadays, or something like that. In other words, same old story, big frickinʼ surprise, but the odd thing is that Matador had always been an indie label by definition, and even if some of their acts did end up with Billboard hits from time to time, it is unclear why they should have subjected Cat Power or anybody else to this old school «give-me-hits-or-get-dropped» treatment.

Perhaps the most ironic thing about the situation (which eventually led to Marshall leaving the label) is that Wanderer displays no intentional aversion to commercial elements. For one thing, Cat Power even covers a Rihanna song — granted, ʽStayʼ was possibly the most old-fashioned of all Rihannaʼs hits, but still, a Rihanna song is a Rihanna song. For another, ʽWomanʼ is a duet with none other than Lana Del Rey, she of the big sultry lips and the fake Spanish aristocracy heritage: kindred spirit or not, it is clear that people these days are much more likely to hear of Lana than of Chan, and that Lanaʼs presence of the record is pretty much the only chance for Marshall to attract new audiences these days.

However, the essence of Wanderer is not in its alleged commercialism masquerading as anti-commercialism (especially since the lines between the two are so awfully blurred these days anyway), but in its traditionalism. As usual, she plays almost everything herself, but this time she completely eschews electronics, modern beats, and any sort of synthetic gloss, mainly sticking to acoustic guitar and piano — the classic singer-songwriter album, going all the way back to Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro, with echoes of Joan Baez in the distance (the purely conventional medieval folk ballad form of the title track would be right up Joanʼs alley). So, clearly, this is meant to be more of an intense personal experience than an exploration of forms and textures. Which is quite understandable in light of everything that happened with Chan over the previous six years. She wishes to share, and we are given a chance to empathize.

Unfortunately, there is not all that much on the album beyond its reasonably well crafted call to empathy that would deserve detailed comment. If your listening quotas on singer-songwriter stuff have already been filled up, you might find yourself thinking something like I do at the beginning of ʽHorizonʼ: "Well, she starts off by borrowing the chords to Aimee Mannʼs ʽWise Upʼ... and now she goes ʽmotheeeeeeeeer...ʼ ʽfatheeeeeeer....ʼ just like John Lennon on ʽMotherʼ... and this chord change is sort of Pink Floydish...". If these sorts of synthesis resulted in something truly fresh and startling, thatʼd be one thing; however, the big textural difference is that all the songs on the album are quiet, smooth, and carefully polished around all the sharp edges so you do not hurt your feelings too much — a little surprising, Iʼd say, for an artist who prides herself on being independent and honest, but then again, her honesty is never in doubt here, only her ability to provoke a strong emotional response in the listener.

The acclaimed duet with Lana, unflinchingly named ʽWomanʼ, is another good example of how this record succeeds in making an artistic statement, but does not succeed in making it an exciting or memorable statement. The lyrics are vague and gauzy, lightly and nonchalantly accusing somebody of something; the chords are flimsy and generic, wasting a perfectly good Leslie pedal in the process (check out Aimee Mannʼs ʽLost In Spaceʼ for a good example of how a thing like that is not wasted in a singer-songwriter context); the climactic surge in energy is a Chan-Lana mantra consisting of nothing but the word "woman" repeated so many times youʼd think there was an inexhaustible store of mana in it or something... well, maybe there is, but if I want a real woman to rock my boat in this manner, I will go to Stevie Nicks instead (any chosen ten seconds of the coda to ʽRhiannonʼ or ʽGold Dust Womanʼ have more tension to them than the entirety of this dull mantra). It is not cringeworthy bad — it is simply a song that will pass me by like millions of them; the only bad thing about it is that it is more pretentious than many others, yet wastes its pretense with poor lyrics, monotonous vocal deliveries, and unimaginative chords.

The entire album is like that: the mood never changes once from song to song, the arrangements never stray to far away from the piano / acoustic guitar routine, and the lyrics always run this weird line between desperately wanting to fling out some bitter truth and taking good care not to offend anybody and to avoid unambiguous interpretation. The underlying artistic motif of being unable to settle down and seemingly afflicted with a Wandering Jew-like curse does recur fairly explicitly, over and over again, from the two versions of the title track to the gypsy balladeering of ʽMe Voyʼ, but everything is nostalgically rooted in the melancholic spirit of the late Nineties, where most of these songs truly belong. I do like bits and pieces — the gritty sarcasm of the "donʼt you forget it, donʼt you dare forget it" chorus of ʽIn Your Faceʼ, the somnambulant sorrow of the repetitive "you will get, you will get what you want" chorus of ʽYou Getʼ, etc. — but on the whole, this is not a successful demonstration of Chan Marshallʼs unique and inspirational artistry. Granted, she was never graced with genius even at her best, but on albums like these, where it is all about soul and spirit rather than bells and whistles, the shortcomings stare you in the face much more brightly. 

Cat Power: Sun

CAT POWER: 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.

Cat Power: Jukebox

CAT POWER: 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.

Cat Power: The Greatest

CAT POWER: 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.

Cat Power: You Are Free

CAT POWER: 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.

Cat Power: The Covers Record

CAT POWER: THE COVERS RECORD (2000)

1) (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction; 2) Kingsport Town; 3) Troubled Waters; 4) Naked If I Want To; 5) Sweedeedee; 6) In This Hole; 7) I Found A Reason; 8) Wild Is The Wind; 9) Red Apples; 10) Paths Of Victory; 11) Salty Dog; 12) Sea Of Love.

You can probably already see from the preceding reviews that I am in no hurry to join the circle of adulators when it comes to Ms. Marshall and her ideas on how to use up her talents. And this is too bad, because when next it comes to The Covers Record, it is pretty damn hard to feel any­thing but hateful numbness unless you already are an adulator. Apparently, the «success» of Moon Pix (a fairly relative one — it's not like it made a Madonna out of her or anything) led her to thinking that now she had to perform one of those classic «artistic suicides», like Dylan's Self Portrait, to take the attention away from her persona and draw it to something else, becoming an interpreter for a while, instead of an artist.

To that end, The Covers Record does indeed consist of 12 covers, ranging from old folk and blues numbers to such Sixties' classics as ʽSatisfactionʼ and obscurities such as Moby Grape's ʽNaked If I Want Toʼ; most of them are transformed beyond recognition and often symbolically castrated by the removal of chorus hooks (which she'd already actually done much earlier, e. g. with Tom Waits' ʽYesterday Is Hereʼ), and to say that the arrangements are sparse would be say­ing nothing — most of the guitar-only and piano-only tunes are reduced to two or three chords, placed on endless repetition. Carrying the Pink Moon analogy over from the previous album, I'd have to say that Pink Moon, in comparison to this, sounds like a Mahler symphony.

Some, indeed, will find this approach as haunting, mysterious, chilly, and grappling as anything Cat Power ever did — and I do agree, in principle, that a reinvention of ʽSatisfactionʼ as an intro­spective, almost dark-folkish ballad with only the verse lyrics preserved sounds cool in theory, and even in practice... for the first thirty seconds or so. But the joke gets predictable and boring very, very quickly. The formula is always precisely the same: take any song (sad, happy, angry, lyrical, whimsical, whatever), deconstruct and strip its melody to the barest of bare essentials (simple enough to play for anybody with a couple weeks worth of musical training), and sing its lyrics in that icy-tender, husky, back-from-the-dead tone that leaves no doubt about it — here's a human being who's been through much more than you (sucker).

Problem is, this does not exactly tie in with the stated goal of the record: instead of humbly diver­ting attention from her own Moon Pix persona, she reinvents these songs so drastically that they no longer retain any of the original spirit and simply become another bunch of Cat Power songs, only this time, very poorly written ones. Apparently, her shows at the time included a projection of Dreyer's Passion Of Joan Of Arc while she was playing and singing the songs — which, if you ask me, comes across as a fairly arrogant gesture, rather than a humble one (a truly humble ges­ture would probably be to simply replace the concert with the film: I, for one, would much more love to see another screening of Passion than sit through Chan plink her way through all twelve of these «covers»).

It is not even the minimalism as such that drives me nuts — it is the idea of using this fatalistic moroseness as the single common denominator to which everything is reduced. When the former­ly pissed off ʽSatisfactionʼ, the formerly triumphant and inspiring ʽPaths Of Victoryʼ, the former­ly dangerous-romantic ʽWild Is The Windʼ, and the formerly facetious ʽSalty Dogʼ all become the same brand of ʽStill I'm Sadʼ, I just fail to see the point. Are we supposed to think that at the bottom of all these tunes there is indeed endless sadness, and that it was not until Chan Marshall opened our eyes to this that it became so evident? Or should we take this as a metaphoric state­ment of the «when you're overwhelmed with one emotion, you tend to view everything in the world through that emotional state» variety? But even if this is so, was this really sufficient to justify using an average of 2-3 notes for each song? And if this symbolizes the extremity of sad­ness, why not just pull a Cage on us and release nothing but silence?

In short, I'm not getting this and certainly not pretending to get this. A curious idea in theory that outlasts its welcome in less than two minutes, and is far more pretentious than it is humble. In the long run, the cover of ʽSatisfactionʼ is good enough to serve as a chuckle generator for unsuspec­ting friends, and the last two tracks are surprisingly listenable (on ʽSalty Dogʼ, she sings to the guitar playing of Matt Sweeney — you can tell, because there are many more than two notes here; and ʽSea Of Loveʼ, which sounds as if she's playing it by plucking open piano strings harp-style, is at least slightly livelier and perkier than the rest), but that's about it, and a thumbs down reac­tion, alas, seems inevitable.

Cat Power: Moon Pix

CAT POWER: MOON PIX (1998)

1) American Flag; 2) He Turns Down; 3) No Sense; 4) Say; 5) Metal Heart; 6) Back Of Your Head; 7) Moonshiner; 8) You May Know Him; 9) Colors And The Kids; 10) Cross Bones Style; 11) Peking Saint.

This is it, the moment of truth — if you don't like Moon Pix, you're probably more of a dog power than a cat power person; and if you like, but don't love Moon Pix (like I do), you must have serious problems with quite a lot of modern musical art, because Moon Pix is really it: a record that is modern-artsy to the extreme, a set of semi-improvisational, stream-of-conscious­ness-like rambling confessions that sound like they were recorded in a hazy trance. In fact, I don't know about «recorded», but legend has it that many of the songs were written by Chan in one night under the influence of a disturbing nightmare, involving dark spirits and demons and all sorts of stuff that, you know, can sometimes happen to a girl from Georgia overdosing on New York City. Perhaps that is why the album is called Moon Pix, even if the only song on the album with a direct reference to ʽmoonʼ is ʽMoonshinerʼ, and that's a different kind of moon.

Anyway, if I were a mean, evil person, I would have certainly taken the chance to mock the song­writer on account of a lyric like "It must be the colors / And the kids / That keep me alive / 'Cause the music is boring me to death". Honestly, when listening to Moon Pix, this is precisely the feeling I get — the music is boring me to death, but the colors of the album are what saves it from mediocrity. ʽColors And The Kidsʼ is basically just three piano chords put on repeat for about six and a half minutes, and her voice, fading in and out of the picture, sometimes cracking from excessive emotionality and sometimes dissipating from lack of training, is no great shakes either — but the first thing you realize with surprise is that somehow, this does not annoy your aural nerves (the only thing that does annoy me a bit is the sound of the piano lid closing at the end: cheap trick! cheap trick!), and from there, you can slowly build up appreciation for the odd atmosphere that she constructs, that good old optimistic pessimism, or pessimistic optimism, whatever, with just a touch of laziness and apathy because, you know, the universe is expanding or something like that, so what does everything else matter?

My biggest problem is that, even though she is now in Australia and recording with a completely different band, and the production is relatively hi-fi and the instrumentation relatively diverse (there's even a separate flute player), the music is still not up to par — mostly standard folk and blues patterns without any innovative or personal touches — and that, for all her talent, Chan is still refusing to take singing lessons, metaphorically speaking. I know I should be falling over my head with songs like ʽMetal Heartʼ and ʽCross Bones Styleʼ, but I am unable to perceive them as «magical», like so many fans do — pleasant, yes, mildly disturbing, yes, but nothing that would cut across the heart like a razorblade. Even ʽCross Bones Styleʼ, which is supposedly a dark folk lament over the horrible fates of diamond miners in South Africa (impossible to tell from the lyrics, but you can tell the song is mournful and disturbing), basically just rolls by like a chilly breeze — some jangly drony acoustic chords, some double-tracked folksy harmonies with high-low modulation, nothing too flashy and absolutely no secrets to come undone over the course of repeated listens. And repeated listens are necessary, because eventually you come to realize that the only source of real dread and creepiness would be the normality of it all — the total lack of any sort of flashy sonics or production gimmicks. Not that this wasn't the case with her previous records as well; it's just that Moon Pix is a clear step forward in terms of sonics and production, and since there are more instruments and some actual musicians backing her this time, you'd think you could expect something different, but no! You can't, really.

Actually, you know, I'm not exactly right when I speak about a lack of gimmicks — every re­viewer of Moon Pix feels it necessary to remind the reader of the backwards drum loop on ʽAme­rican Flagʼ that was, believe it or not, sampled from the Beastie Boys' ʽPaul Revereʼ (but why?); or of Belinda Woods' flute work on the folk ballad ʽHe Turns Downʼ (pretty, but quite low in the mix, and not really making much of a difference); or of the thunder bursts on ʽSayʼ, which make you feel locked up for safety in the room with the artist while nature is having a wild ball on the outside... but then again, almost every song on the album feels private and intimate anyway. So, essentially, the gimmicks are there, but they just don't matter.

What matters is the combination of largely predictable, though tasteful, folk and blues patterns, hookless vocals, ambiguous lyrics, and morose atmosphere. The one album that somehow springs to mind in connection with this is not even by a female artist — it is Nick Drake's Pink Moon, and guess what, I didn't even realize when I thought of it that it also had the word "moon" in the title. The difference being that Nick played a better guitar, had a better singing voice, wrote better songs, and could work that "don't-mind-me-I'm-just-humming-this-tune-in-the-corner" vibe much more efficiently than Chan Marshall, who can still occasionally come across as too narcissistic. Still, she's got one on him at least — she sounds a bit more human and relatable, whereas Nick was basically a Christ-like figure: you didn't really have a good idea of how to approach him, how to address him, whether he shits rose petals etc. — tons of mystery. This is where Marshall's «ordinariness» in terms of playing and singing really works well for her.

I give the record a thumbs up because I appreciate the rugged charisma, the lyrical originality, and the unquestionable progress in «formal» terms (more stylistic diversity, better production, interesting bits of studio experimentation), but I do wish that something more would remain in my head than the line "Yellow hair, you're a funny bear" that somehow got me trapped in a love-hate relationship — moving, yes, but also sounding a bit like the blueprint for everything that I hate about SIKC (Sentimental Indie Kid Culture), you know, that part of the universe where you have to get sad only because it's a sin to be happy, or, even worse, when all the bad things around you are only used as a pretext to get sad, because Sad is Cool. In other words, color me uncon­vinced — on a scale of 1 to 10, I'd rate the sadness of Moon Pix about 4 or 5 («not irritating be­cause the person sounds nice, not genuinely moving because the feel is an artificial one»). But that's just because I'm fairly jaded on sadness, I guess.

Cat Power: What Would The Community Think

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.

Cat Power: Myra Lee

CAT POWER: MYRA LEE (1996)

1) Enough; 2) We All Die; 3) Great Expectations; 4) Top Expert; 5) Ice Water; 6) Still In Love; 7) Rockets; 8) Faces; 9) Fiance; 10) Wealthy Man; 11) Not What You Want.

From a brief preliminary introduction, welcome to the full-length presentation of Cat Power, symbolically named after her mother, who, according to some accounts, may have been even whackier than her daughter — which accounts for some of the album's weirdness, but far from all of it. As I already mentioned, these tracks were recorded at the same time as the ones for Dear Sir, and there is even some redundancy (ʽRocketsʼ is found on both albums, and ʽGreat Expec­tationsʼ would later be appended to reissues of Dear Sir, although it was not present on the ori­ginal pressing), but this here is a larger and slightly more diverse collection, giving you a more comprehensive portrait of Chan Marshall in her early days, provided you're really interested.

In all fairness, though, there is not much to add to the review of Dear Sir: the thing that matters most about this record is still atmosphere and attitude, and they are predictably the same — Chan Marshall is still walking the nighttime streets of a post-nuclear-apocalyptic city in a state of com­plete trance and mental meltdown, singing songs that feel like barely regulated streams of con­scious and are just as memorable as any such stream. Some people fall for that very easily, but I remain spoiled by great women in music who could drive themselves to similar states, yet remain either far more intriguing and unpredictable in terms of melody (Joni Mitchell), or far more im­pressive as emotional powerhouses (Patti Smith). Marshall, unfortunately, does not do either: her melodies here are replete with boring Sonic Youth-isms, and her personal charisma is... well, on the level of «passable» when she is mumbling and «annoying» when she is screaming.

Nevertheless, at least a few of the tracks at least stand out against the general background, which is more than could be said about Dear Sir. In particular, ʽWe All Dieʼ, based on a fatalistic descending guitar/bass riff and a sonic arrangement that brings to mind Tom Waits' Bone Machine, has a gritty punch that helps the song's frozen chorus of "hell, we all die sometimes, hell, we all try somewhere" get under your skin, rather than just sit there as one more of those pretentious and ultimately useless statements. (The only other track that has a loud, tough rhyth­mic base is ʽTop Expertʼ, but there the musical backbone is quite unexceptional). And as a fun gimmick, you have an «expressionist singer-songwriter deconstruction» of Hank Williams' ʽStill In Love With Youʼ — a first-rate example of how one can take a super-catchy country tune, suck all the hooks out of it, and transform it into «pure feeling» because the notion of catchiness is, you know, so ugly and anti-artistic. See, she is doing Hank a big service — we all know Hank was a genius, but he happened to write songs that intentionally got stuck in your head, which is very anti-life-like, because, see, you usually go through life without its experiences constantly sticking in your head, so what Chan is doing here is, she's preserving the genius but she's also making it more life-like and spontaneous and honest. Fuck form, just save the spirit. (By the way, she sings it so low that I'm almost dying to learn if it couldn't make a bigger impression on me if it were sung by the late Nico, who must have been a big influence on Cat Power anyway).

Further individual comments on particular songs would make no sense — it's all about droning repetition and half-sung, half-mumbled repetition of poetry that I find highly questionable and, what is worse, devoid of genuine magic. The whole thing reaches an absolute nadir on ʽNot What You Wantʼ, a stripped-down performance (just vocals and acoustic guitar) recorded in abysmal lo-fi quality and featuring all the trademark qualities of generic indie shit (poorly tuned and barely played guitar; rough singing that regularly turns to off-key screaming; and a message of self-assertion that apparently tries to seduce us with the «realism» of what is going on). Fortuna­tely, the rest of the album is much better produced, played, and sung, so we'd have to assume that the song was a last-minute addition of some unfinished and unpolished demo, to give the album a rougher edge (I'd recommend just stopping it at the end of ʽWealthy Manʼ, though).

In brief, Myra Lee runs on «honesty» (that is, if you accept the whole vibe as honest, which is your personal choice) and «spontaneity» more than anything else, so proceed at your own risk; I do not condemn the record for the same reasons I did not feel disgusted about Dear Sir (and one key point here is the near-complete lack of wallowing in self-pity, which, to me, is an immediate turn-off in the case of such records — see Conor Oberst for an extreme case), but I certainly do not regard it as much of an improvement, either.

Cat Power: Dear Sir

CAT POWER: DEAR SIR (1995)

1) 3 Times; 2) Rockets; 3) Itchyhead; 4) Yesterday Is Here; 5) The Sleepwalker; 6) Mr. Gallo; 7) No Matter; 8) Great Expectations; 9) Headlights.

"If you want money in your pocket, top hat on your head, hot meal on your table, and a blanket on your bed — come to New York City..." The cover of Tom Waits' ʽYesterday Is Hereʼ was certainly not included by Chan Marshall, a.k.a. Cat Power, on her debut record by accident — that was precisely the kind of advice she took, moving out of the stifling confines of Atlanta, Georgia, and relocating to New York where her muse would be nurtured under more suitable conditions. Sonic Youth took note of her there, and their drummer, Steve Shelley, eventually got her to sign for the indie label Runt Records, and found her some recording space in a basement on Mott Street — the classic indie setup.

She did sound a lot like a one-woman Sonic Youth in those early days, to be sure. Most of the mate­rial recorded for those sessions (divided between 1995's «tentative» release Dear Sir and the much longer 1996's Myra Lee, which she would consider her proper debut) shares certain defi­nitive features with the band — namely, free-form poetic self-expression riding on a bedrock of dark, grim electric guitar lines inherited from the Velvet Underground, but completely stripped of any resemblance to «pop» textures. On the other hand, words and vocal attitude matter even more for Marshall than for Sonic Youth — here, she clearly and boldly presents herself as a poet first and a musician second, so think Patti Smith, too. Patti Smith backed by Sonic Youth — there, that's a pretty good analogy.

In other words, if you're looking for an interesting melody to take home in a doggy bag, or for a vocal hook that might stick to your brain like a burr to a dog's ass, this record would be about as useful for this purpose as The Natural Sounds Of Wilderness, Vol. 5: Pig Frogs. The only way to enjoy and worship this is a pledge of allegiance to CAT POWER as the new spiritual current that will efficiently spring clean your chakras. Chan Marshall sings like a possessed woman (I get the impression of somebody sitting in a completely immobile position and staring without blinking at the same spot on the wall all the time while the recording is on); writes lyrics that confirm her status as the second coming of Mad Ophelia; and uses those guitars only as black atmospheric accompaniment for the words and nothing else (in which she is aided by second guitarist Tim Foljahn, who adds slightly cleaner and higher lead lines to her gruff rhythm work).

Not surprisingly, Dear Sir is one of those albums where it is hard to imagine any kind of middle ground — you either fall under its spell and give it an A+ or you don't, and give it a Z-. To avoid extreme lines of thinking, I will take the cowardly way out and say that it is, after all, only a first attempt from a beginning songwriter (although she was already 23 years old when it was released, and had already been playing, singing, and writing for a good five years or so, first in Atlanta and then in NYC). This makes it easier to forgive the sometimes annoyingly cryptic or pretentious nature of her poetry, although it does not make the «tunes» more enjoyable — the biggest prob­lem is that, unlike Patti Smith, Chan rarely goes for any brutal, hit-'em-with-all-you-got frontal assaults on the listener. Most of the lyrics are either mumbled or strung out in shrill, whiny over­tones; and even when she is deliberately being punkish and going all Bikini Kill-ish on our asses (ʽItchyheadʼ), well, the effort is respectable, but the effect is underwhelming — lo-fi production being one reason for this, of course, but also I don't truly feel as if the singer herself is really sure of what it is she is trying to communicate. I can understand she had a pretty tough Georgian childhood, and that her attitude towards the world is anything but friendly ("If I got myself a gun / Then I could shoot down everyone / Maybe I've just invented some religion", she sings four years prior to the Columbine massacre), but it is never made quite clear what really is the prob­lem, or the supposed remedy.

Anyway, bottomline is: these days, Cat Power is largely respected for her musical achievements, but the musical achievements of Dear Sir are practically non-existent — above all, this is a set of atmospheric soundscapes where a seemingly not very unhappy and not very frustrated artist is trying to evocate feelings of extreme unhappiness and frustration. Curious, but I'd still take Patti Smith's Horses over this any time. Or maybe I just don't get serious American street poetry of the past quarter century, period.