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Musician Chan Marshall aka Cat Power
Photo:
Mario Sorrenti
Album of the week:
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Album cover of »Covers«
Another album with cover versions, can't he think of anything else?
With »Covers«, the US songwriter Chan Marshall alias Cat Power is already releasing the third collection of songs that she did not write herself, although with »Wanderer« she recently presented one of the best albums of her career.
But now she's turning her attention back to other people's stuff.
Despicable if not desolate?
Not at all.
Because Marshall, born in Georgia in 1972, is a master of the cover version. Like probably all of us, she carries around songs or fragments of songs that have become dear to her, a kind of "hurt locker" full of tunes that made life easier. Or they simply express something that you cannot formulate yourself. As an artist who writes excellent songs time and time again, being able to recognize this and integrate it into one's own work requires a lot of sovereignty and strength of character.
Instead of copying, Marshall interprets in the best sense.
It is often deconstructions that give rise to interesting new interpretations.
In 2000, she turned the Rolling Stones' testosterone rock into a female on her first »Covers Record«.
In 2008 she did the same thing with country and folk on »Jukebox«, covering Hank Williams and Bob Dylan, but also Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell's »Blue«.
»Covers« may have a simple title, but it is their best and probably most private compendium of foreign compositions to date.
The album's dimmed, hungover vibe is shaped by experiences of isolation and self-questioning during the coronavirus pandemic, Billie Holiday's standard "I'll Be Seeing You," rumored to be her grandmother's favorite song, chosen by Marshall as a touching farewell ode to her late friend and fellow musician Phillippe Zdar.
The Replacements cover »Here Comes A Regular«, accompanied by a gentle piano instead of guitars, leads back to Marshall's nineties of despair and alcohol excesses when she heard the song in the music box in a New York dive bar. With "Unhate," she covers herself for the first time, looking at the drunken fatalism of her 2006 song "Hate" from a more detached, settled perspective.
Marshall has the talent to create an atmosphere of spontaneous intimacy with her music: when she sings, actually she talks more, you feel like you're in a small club or bar.
Places where the most intimate relationships between artist and audience often arise.
Vulture magazine gushed back in 2018 that one day she'll be talked about "like you talk about the music of Bob Dylan or Neil Young, but until then she's somewhere between cult and universally acknowledged genius."
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CatPower
covers
Label: Domino Records
Label: Domino Records
approx. €13.49
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A Cat Power cover version is always an adaptation in the best sense.
She takes the lines that are most important to her or were relevant to her state of mind, tears them out of context, shortens, condenses - often she rewrites or adds her own verses.
For example, the taxi driver's "Allahu-akbar" in Frank Ocean's "Bad Religion" becomes a "Hallelujah, praise the lord" that may seem related to her - and the lovesick prayer, which originally glides along on organ and strings, is given a distinctive guitar motif as well as a very pretty indie pop tune.
In Jackson Brown's world-weary West Coast ballad "These Days," she wistfully writes "highways" that you always thought were there. The originally carnivalesque and rather cryptic "Pa Pa Power" by Ryan Gosling's almost forgotten band Dead Man's Bones, which she has often played live, becomes a powerful empowering anthem for her. All that remains of the text is the catchy line "Burn the streets, burn the cars".
Not everything is equally successful.
She can't counter Nick Cave's feverishness in "I Had A Dream", and she can't think of a gripping new definition for Iggy Pop's post-punk blues "Endless Sea" from 1979.
And with »White Mustang«, originally written by her good friend Lana Del Rey, she might be too considerate.
But free.
What could be nicer and more comforting than to surround yourself with beloved songs in the darkest of times that reliably carry you through difficult hours?
Chan Marshall perhaps reveals a deeper glimpse into her inner life with her snuggly blanket "covers" than if she had written her own lockdown songs.
(8.5)
Listened briefly:
Elvis Costello & The Imposters - »The Boy Named If«
You thought you'd lost Declan McManus to the disparate bar jazz of his stupid last album, but just under a year later the 67-year-old surprises with stormy, sentimental, beautifully rattling pop songs that often recall the power of his early New Wave years remember.
"The Boy Named If" consists of "snapshots that deal with the last days of being young," says Costello.
But the album is also about that "humiliating moment" when you're told not to act like a kid anymore.
Of course you have to play the heart-bleeding rascal again.
But fortunately not politically as a defiant lateral thinker bully like colleague Van Morrison, but rather clever and wise as an age befitting his age.
(7.7)
Earl Sweatshirt - "Sick!"
It didn't turn out to be the big Black Lives Matter album that Thebe Neruda Kgositsile, aka Earl Sweatshirt, was said to have almost finished: almost all of the material was lost, along with the computer it was stored on, he said recently on »Mixmag«. And Corona pushed itself to the fore: "Sick!", programmatically titled for the zeitgeist, is again quite short at 24 minutes and shows the now 27-year-old rapper, once part of the Odd Future crew around Tyler, The Creator and Frank Ocean, hungover, but also with new clarity and precision. Vocally and musically freed from mumbling and blurring, the son of a South African star poet and a renowned law professor from Chicago begins to heal and process his messed up biography: family stress,depression and addiction. No
giant step
, but a bold reset.
(7.5)
Daniel Blumberg - »The World To Come« (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Who says that only Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead), who will probably soon be nominated for an Oscar again, can compose an intense film soundtrack for a queer western ("The Violence of the Dogs")?
The songwriter, visual artist and musician Daniel Blumberg, who recently released a wonderful pop album »On&On«, also comes from the smarter British indie rock scene.
The always exciting and disturbing music to Mona Fastvold's »The World To Come«, a lesbian variation of »Brokeback Mountain«, with sinister gothic horror score, partly improvised jazz (among others by Peter Brötzmann on the clarinet) and sensual balladry, is Blumberg's first , very convincing feature film work.
If Jonny doesn't have time... (8.0)
Blow - »Shake The Disease«
"Shake The Disease" is of course the best album title in times of Corona, even if you first think of Depeche Mode and their pandemic-free hit from 1985. Blow, a French electronic trio who had a small success in 2017 with »Fall In Deep«, has it originality, but not like that anyway. Their music, on the second album warmer and more analog than on their debut four years ago, sways gently and dreamily between laid back, air and jungle. Very pretty, especially when the great American-French newcomer Anna Majidson sings along to the title track. "Don't give up on what we're seeking," sings Quentin Guglielmi with plenty of echo on his voice, but what was it that this band was looking for? Maybe logical, but also tragic,that Blow disbanded in time for release. They blew it, quel dommage! (5.0)
