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IVH: Cat Power / Covers [1]
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Date: 2025-01-23
Tonight’s selections from Cat Power’s eleventh album, 2022’s Covers. Which yes, is Chan (pronounced “Shawn”) Marshall's re-imaging of songs popularized by other musicians.
Indie icon Cat Power — a.k.a. Chan Marshall — has been releasing fine albums of original material for more than 25 years, but imaginative covers have always been a big part of her sound: Her sparse debut LP, “Dear Sir,” which featured a song written by Tom Waits and one by This Kind of Punishment, set the mold for a carefully curated mixture of classic and contemporary tracks written by others. “Covers” is actually Marshall’s third all-covers album. She released “The Covers Album” in and “Jukebox” in 2008, the latter arriving in the wake of “The Greatest,” the most commercially successful album of her career, an alternative/NPR-leaning hit that even reached No. 12 on the Billboard 200. But ironically, Marshall reinvents and inhabits others’ songs so completely that they sound like originals, and “Covers” is no exception: The songs here veer from just-recognizable to barely recognizable at all, with the focus on her unmistakable voice, often gorgeously multi-tracked and highlighted by spare production. — Variety
You Got the Silver (The Rolling Stones)
Things to know up front – the range of covers on offer here is quietly thrilling: Frank Ocean’s ‘Bad Religion’, Iggy Pop’s ‘The Endless Sea’, The Pogues’ ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’, Jackson Browne’s ‘These Days’ (famously previously covered by Nico), Nick Cave’s ‘I Had a Dream, Joe’, ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’, a song made famous by Billie Holliday and – audaciously you might say – herself (she covers ‘Hate’ from the 2006 album, The Greatest as ‘Unhate’), among others. If you were to dive in at the songs you knew, you’d quickly see these songs no longer belong to their owners. This is a Cat Power album as surely as anything else she has done. It’s worth saying, it’s more than the arrangements that are tinkered with. Power cuts lyrics. Tweaks. Adds new lines on occasion. Her choices seem intent with ulterior motives. Covers isn’t an album that takes you by the hand. This is an album that reveals its pleasures uneasily. It would be easy to let the album run on in the background and miss what it had to show you. It might be you don’t get snagged until Power’s cover of ‘Pa Pa Power’ (originally performed by Ryan Gosling’s band, of all things) – it has a strident guitar motif, a breathy (pa pa power) pop vocal. The pump organ rendition of The Pogues’ classic is a warm and (by the standards of this record) comforting sound. Maybe it will be ‘These Days’ (just Power and an acoustic) that hooks you. It’s possible, if you’re the kind of person who gives an album a listen or two, that Cat Power’s Covers won’t be for you. It’s a collection of songs that requires you to spend time in its company. It might be that the best way to hear these songs is on shuffle, each song turning up like a strange friend to remind you of how long it’s been. Ah, you might say – here is Cat Powers covering The Replacements’ ‘Here Comes a Regular’. Here is Cat Power covering Lana Del Rey’s ‘White Mustang’. It might be that – to unpin that pin – you were interested in Cat Power and wanted to know where to start. We’d direct you to the aforementioned album, The Greatest. This one is for people who have an idea of what they are getting. — Picky Bastards
Bad Religion (Frank Ocean)
Against the Wind (Bob Seger)
To render a song so unrecognizable can appear irreverent, but Marshall has never come off as ironic or trolling. Even her most radical reinterpretations feel tender, searching, and, above all, thoughtful. And there are many: In addition to what are now three collections of cover songs, with the arrival of her latest album, Covers, most of her releases contain at least one song made famous by another singer. Her choices can be canonical or idiosyncratic: She’s tackled Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan, and Billie Holiday, but also Liza Minelli, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Ca$h Money rappers Hot Boys. Long before indie rock’s cloistered scene had given way to a more diverse and dynamic landscape, Marshall reminded her listeners that life didn’t begin with the Velvet Underground (even though she covered them too). The widest ranging of any of her covers collections yet, Covers pushes beyond the habitual melancholy that has marked much of her work. In bold colors and vivid relief, it illustrates her talent for radical reinvention. Her choices are audacious right from the opening track: “Bad Religion,” a total teardown of Frank Ocean’s 2012 single about nursing emotional wounds. In place of the original’s gospel organs and ’60s soul strings, Marshall swaps in piano backed by a subtle but muscular rock rhythm section. She not only changes the song’s key; she writes new chords and even a new melody. And while some of her lyrical edits might seem minor on the page—“Praise the Lord/Hallelujah, little girl” in place of “Allahu akbar”—her delivery brings these lines to the forefront, drawing out “Lord” into four agonized syllables that feel like a physical bloodletting. The most striking line of all is her own addition: “All just stuck in the mud/Praying to the invisible above,” an act of supplication that teases out the song’s implicit theme of faith and illuminates it like a cross up on the wall. Rarely content with merely rearranging the decor of a given song, Marshall seems happier tearing up floorboards and pulling down drywall, as though she were intent upon revealing structures that were there all along, just hidden from view. On “Unhate,” she covers herself, translating the skeletal blues of The Greatest’s “Hate” into a smoldering, psychedelic whorl of Rhodes and multi-tracked vocals. To revisit a song where the key line is “I hate myself and I want to die” is no small thing; here, it feels like a statement of defiance, as though only by saying the words could she rob them of their power. Where the original is fragile and dejected, this song pulses with life. It’s striking, in fact, how forceful so many of the songs are. She turns the motorik chug of Iggy Pop’s “The Endless Sea” into an eerie electric blues, woozy but hi-def, that takes additional cues from the Stooges’ “Dirt”; she remakes the rolling psychobilly of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ “I Had a Dream Joe” into a seething, churning drone that feels cut from Swans’ ritualistic cloth. — Pitchfork
Pa Pa Power (Dead Man's Bones)
There’s a definite magic to the mystery of Cat Power’s new album, Covers. It’s often not easy to articulate what draws someone to a particular track. Suffice it to say certain songs simply enter your consciousness and refuse to leave. Digging into the bones of other people’s work gives artists the opportunity to find new moments begging to get out. Chan Marshall certainly does that on this, her third collection of mostly other people’s work. Mostly because on this collection she rerecords “Hate” as “Unhate,” looking at her own experiences from a new perspective as well. How do you make an album that sounds all of one piece when the choices include songs dating back to the ‘40s? Basically, you have to be fearless, a quality that Marshall possesses. In her own words: “When I work, I don’t look back – I just keep going. Trusting my gut is a survival technique.” Which is how you can come up with a set list that includes Bob Seger next to Shane MacGowan and Paul Westerberg leading into Billie Holiday. There are points where her craft almost seems to be invisible; Marshall takes songs and makes them her own. — Spectrum Culture
Unhate (Cat Power)
WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
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