Music Box | Cat Power

Mike Newmark Assistant Arts Editor

Cat Power
The Greatest
[Matador]
three stars

Chan Marshall (a.k.a. Cat Power) is well-known by now for her inconsistent live performances. See her on Friday and she’ll croon for hours. See her on Saturday and she’ll hunch over the piano with a bottle of Jack, muttering diatribes under her breath before running offstage in tears. Taken with her tortured lyricism and sprawling full-lengths, these actions painted Cat Power as simultaneously brazen and insecure, and as such, she helped redefine the notion of the independent musician by living out the discomfort that came from composing exactly what she felt she needed to compose.

So what would Cat Power think upon hearing that she’d receive a hefty recording budget and play with Al Green’s hit-makers at the same studio as Dave Matthews and R.E.M.? If you said, “She would run screaming into the night,” you’re wrong. Abandoning the oblique, quietly angsty indie rock of You Are Free, Cat Power cuts her teeth on Southern soul for her seventh LP, The Greatest. She recorded the album in Memphis at the world-famous Ardent Studios with veteran soul musicians Mabon Hodges, Leroy Hodges and Steve Potts, for a detour into a singer-songwriter’s take on Memphis blues-lite.

Despite—or because of—the hype and the impressive roster, The Greatest falls a bit short. Yes, these famed musicians are supposed to ballast Marshall, not upstage her, but their contributions could have been made by anyone—a twang here, a lazy drum fill there, and all performed with a disappointing lack of élan. Fault the studio, too, for rendering the album’s second half somewhat limp, and for some of the album’s biggest blunders: in roughly half the songs, for example, Marshall’s voice appears as a ghosted backing vocal, like a gospel singer from beyond the grave. It’s sillier than it sounds.

Cat Power doesn’t let these flaws derail the entire album, however, since the strength of her records has always been in the arrangements, vocals and lyrics—not the studio techniques or the backing band. Marshall’s voice has never sounded better than it does here; coarsened by whiskey and time, her vocals take on a torchy, sultry tone that fits the music like a glove.

The album’s first half also features some of Cat Power’s loveliest songs to date. If the gently swinging ditty “Could We” is perfect for playing over the barroom juke as young couples sway on the dance floor, “Lived in Bars” is the moonlit slow-dance after the barroom has closed down for the night. The title track is the album’s crown jewel, beginning as an archetypal Cat Power piano arrangement and adding guitars, strings, and a slowly loping drumbeat like ripples in a pond. Far from being a song of fist-pumping glory, “The Greatest” is actually a saddening white flag; she begins, “Once I wanted to be the greatest / No wind or waterfall could stop me.” Anyone who knows Cat Power can easily conjecture what becomes of our narrator from here.

Yet what’s missing from The Greatest are those gripping moments found on You Are Free and earlier, more overtly tense albums like Myra Lee. There’s more drama in a song like “Names” (from You Are Free) than in anything The Greatest has to offer, and it’s not because Marshall holds back lyrically; she doesn’t, if bald-faced confessions like “I hate myself and I want to die” are any indication. It is because she allowed the Memphis soul theme to drive the work to its final destination, and somewhere along the way it became more important to sound pretty than to create something meaningful. The Greatest is Cat Power’s most listenable record thus far, but for an artist this willfully challenging, is that really a success?