The Post-Rockist

Cat Power - “Lost Someone”

Cat Power - “Aretha, Sing One for Me”

(from Jukebox)

It’s after hours and you’re in a haze. Your bourbon buzz is starting to fade and exhaustion is creeping in. You’re lost, in a bad part of town, and alone. Every building you see looks abandoned, uninhabited, and eerily hostile. There’s a faraway hum of an organ; it seems to be coming from the old blues joint on 17th Street that was shut down after its liquor license was revoked and never, to your knowledge, reopened. The front door is boarded up, but you notice that the entrance in the back alley is rigged open. You stumble in, the place is empty. But there, on the stage, is a woman singing mournfully and seemingly to no one. There’s one flickering light shining on her, and the band playing along with her is shrouded in darkness.

It’s hard to pin down the exact scenario in which listening to Cat Power’s Jukebox is most appropriate, in part because the album itself sounds so fragile and ephemeral. It’s distant, evasive, noncommittal — almost as if your listening to it is an accidental act, as if these were rough sketches hashed out late one night in a studio and discovered some years later by a surprised archivist. But even as rough sketches, the songs are beautiful for their fluidity and the way they effortlessly flow from dusty old country to Muscle Shoals soul. Even as a covers album, Jukebox has whispers of self-confession and, in a perhaps unintentional way, a vague air of melodrama.

Jukebox opens up with quiet, restrained versions of “New York” and “Ramblin’ (Wo)man,” two songs sure to raise the ire of Sinatra and Hank Williams purists for her unwillingness to stay true to form. While not a particularly gripping opening, they do set the mood for the rest of the album, seductive and resolute, with a tiny glimmer of hope. Chan Marshall’s backing band, the Dirty Delta Blues Band — which includes the Dirty Three’s Jim White on drums and the John Spencer Blues Explosion’s Judah Bauer on guitar — play with a much gentler touch than the Al Green session players who worked on her last album. While The Greatest had a rich Memphis sound throughout, Jukebox covers like Billie Holiday’s “Don’t Explain” or Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” give the impression that the band is perpetually on the verge of fade out. But in a way it works, and it only serves to heighten the presence of Marshall’s smoky vocals.

Most remarkable (and probably most contentious) is the remake of “Metal Heart,” one of the best songs off Cat Power’s earlier album Moon Pix. As great as the original was, it still sounded like a product of its time, reasonably befitting an “alternative” tag for the late 1990s. Marshall’s reworking on Jukebox, meanwhile, sounds out of time. Not necessarily that it will “stand the test of time” better than the original, just that it sounds like it’s working on its own tangential time line. The sparse arrangement of the original has been uplifted with crashing cymbals and haunting guitar and piano. It doesn’t sound like anything else being released today, but at the same time it doesn’t feel retro or throwback, and in no way is it futuristic.

And that’s exactly what makes this album so strong. A year after recovering from her breakdown in a Miami hospital, Marshall has reemerged as one of the most distinct and self-assured songwriter, singer, and arranger out there today. It takes a lot of vision and confidence to breathe new life into an old song, and to do it over and over again with such apparent ease is remarkable. On “Lost Someone” she takes James Brown’s soulful, bended knee plea and strips it of its squeals and brass flourishes, and the bare, echo-filled accompaniment serves to highlight her single-minded determination. It’s unexpectedly groovy and mournful at the same time. Clearly her time spent soaking up southern soul has paid off, as evidenced by her take on “Aretha, Sing One For Me,” which was a hit with Memphis songwriter George Jackson in 1972. It’s the high point of the album, and even though it’s recorded to sound like a Stax studio outtake, the band pulls together like old pros and play with plenty of heart. There seem to be very few artists out there, maybe Wilco, who have taken to shunning trends and focusing on good old fashioned songs as much as Cat Power. I almost hope that becomes a trend again.

-Posted by Todd