Cat Power, The Covers Record (Matador) 9
Chan Marshall -- a.k.a. Cat Power -- truly arrived with her stunning 1998 album Moon Pix. Undaunted by the critical acclaim and expectations, Marshall has taken a side-step with an album of eleven covers and one original. Her confidence is evident when she starts with the cocky move of covering The Stones' venerable "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." Not since Devo has this song seen such a daring reworking. Marshall reduces the song to two chords, a fragment of the lyric, and the bare essence of smoky cool that Mick Jagger hasn't had for nearly thirty years. All the covers, ranging from old folk standards ("Kingsport Town," "Salty Dog"), sixties classics (The Velvet Underground, Moby Grape, Bob Dylan) to recent indie-rock (Smog's "Red Apples") are pretty much successful. But the stark guitar and piano accompaniment leaves one craving a real band, like the two-thirds of Dirty Three, who so beautifully filled the desolate spaces in her last album. Yet it is on another bold cover of "Wild is the Wind," associated with the daunting Nina Simone, that Marshall's raspy, mesmerizing voice makes all instrumentation irrelevant. On "Sea of Love" she rescues the song from Robert Plant's schmaltzy eighties version and returns it to its rightful status of a meditation on sorrow. Any fan of the luminescent Cat Power cannot be without this, but hopefully it is only a prelude to the release of more brilliant originals in the near future.
