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Live Review
by SashaS
19-11-2002
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| Cat Power-ing Chan (pix: Rahav Segev) |
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Live: Cat Power
Bush Hall
Monday, November 18, 2002
Cat Power’s songs are ostensibly as fragile as blow-bubbles
You, in the back, pipe down and don’t whisper, cough, rattle jewellery or cling your glasses and bottles, Cat Power is onstage. This is so soft, heavy breathing disturbs the atmosphere, ingesting interferes with mood… Remember the Spinal Tap? They used to turn their guitars to (famously) “11” and it appears that this songbird’s setting doesn’t go past ‘3’. It’s that quiet, mellow, dreamy, airy…
Cat Power is one-woman-force and is directly opposed to any made-up-hype of the Girl Power kind. Chan Marshall walks out casually, plugs in her guitar and starts a show that is nothing like you’ve ever witnessed. Her songs are like sketches, outlines of mini-rhapsodies, audio-watercolours of the darkest shades imaginable. Bordering on abstract, these are the aural-shaped-particles of a sublime kind…
She’s aloof, disconnected, self-absorbed, imprisoned in intensely private realm that is mainly crowded with heartbreak, loneliness, pain, melancholy – she digs it inside-out. Cat is well aware of her place in the world, her attitude toward the collapsing values is ironic without meanness, comic but deeply moving and engaging, it makes you care about her, her state of mind, your own and the global one. We could all benefit with extended therapy because we all have so many unresolved issues.
Chan doesn’t attempt to offer solutions but highlights concerns in a manner to truly shake living-on-autopilot vista. Imagine an action-movie that inevitably has its love-interest mishandled; Cat-woman handles the love- and life-contents with aplomb and disregards any action. Songs entitled ‘Cross Bones Style’, ‘Metal Heart’, ‘Nude As The News’, ‘What Would The Community Think?’, ‘Colors And The Kids’, indicate well where her interests are. And this Hall is the perfect setting; a fairly unremarkable structure on the outside hides the splendour to rival the nearby Empire and Brixton Academy.
Looking like a cross between Françoise Hardy and Melanie Safka (who? do you think pop music started with Take That?), her songwriting can be related not only to Joni Mitchell, Tori Amos, Björk (for general public) but really Jane Sibbery, Mary Margaret O’Hara and Nico (for the music connoisseurs), all backed by a feminine version of Ry Cooder. This is as ethereal as is a scorcher in a desert while you are floating in a swimming pool… (It reminds me of an experience in Death Valley, paddling through the witching hour while heat radiated as if it were midday…)
She’d later move to a concert piano to face away from her adoring (and quiet as God-fearing church-goers) public to make the whole experience even more surreal. She’s gotten a wicked sense of humour that takes her audience aback and they are slow/stunned/emotionally disturbed to pick on the offered rapport. Lifting her mug she rhetorically asks, “Are tea-bags bad for you?” (well, not as bad as life that annihilates everyone), then challenges us to guess her star-sign and most zodiacs are named but her own (Virgo, apparently, but she could be jesting) and among the shouts is one of ‘Lesbian?’ (What’s your hang-up, bitch?)
At one point she enquires when we need to catch the tube and laconically announces “The last song then,” before playing for another half-hour. Cat Power is like a feline’s affection that can suddenly turn nasty and scratchy. Is this a form of popular music? Perhaps, but it depends on your definition of pop and if that means a boy-group crap, then – it ain’t. But this is pop as it used to be, dealing with beauty, languorous tones that help you build a mental picture of a sonic-haven; her compositions present neo-sensibility.
Indulgence in her next disc, ‘You Are Free’, is about a quarter-year away. Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder duets on it and Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters leader) drums on one track which is rather strange because the only rhythm she keeps tonight is by tapping her long leg. The best way to get introduced to this Power is by listening to ‘The Covers Record’ that takes known songs and de/re-constructs them into some other entities. Then, move onto her best-received album, ‘Moon Pix’, and get it all revised.
We’ve had American Dream and myths, ‘American Psycho’, American nightmare (9/11), ‘American Supreme’ (Suicide’s new album) and this is, forget Edgar Allan Poe, American mystery… And so magical that at one moment I hit the anxiety high by realising I wasn’t in control of my senses anymore!!! Now, that’s art…
SashaS
19-11-2002
Cat Power’s album ‘You Are Free’ is released 18 February 2003 on Matador
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