Cat Power
Two of the more complicated women in indie rock have just gone all Dusty in Memphis on us. Chan Marshall recorded Cat Power’s The Greatest (Matador) with a veteran session crew, anchored by Hi Records house-band siblings Teenie and Flick Hodges, at Memphis’s Ardent Studios–the birthplace of Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man” and the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There” (and, lest we forget, 3 Doors Down’s “Kryptonite”). And on her first solo album, Rilo Kiley front woman Jenny Lewis blends her vocals with the buttery harmonies of the Louisville-bred Watson Twins on Rabbit Fur Coat (Team Love), which is modeled after Laura Nyro’s 1971 soul dalliance, a collaboration with LaBelle called Gonna Take a Miracle. Either project could easily have devolved into a game of dress-up: soul music is rooted in a specific form, history, community, and spirituality that can swallow up a singer’s personality. But both Marshall and Lewis, two candidly self-involved songwriters, actually emerge with their identities more clearly articulated.
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There’s precious little of Dusty’s Swinging London in Chan (born Charlyn) Marshall. The inert beauty of Cat Power songs echoes the stoic reserve of the emotionally devastated, a mood epitomized by British folk revivalists like Sandy Denny and Linda Thompson–or to be more specific, their wan descendant Beth Orton. Writing for Pitchfork, Chris Ott pegged Marshall as “the porcelain art-school doll whose blissful confusion you could never hold in your hands,” and in fact she’s acted like even more of a drip than that compliment suggests or her considerable talent warrants. Her onstage shambling and mumbling can make her live shows unbearable for anyone who isn’t a devotee; her limp 2000 cover of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” ended with what might be the most fraudulent voicing of “I try” ever recorded. She’s an arty cipher whose erratic doldrums have felt deliberately vague–you could mistake them for your own or, if your taste in lust objects runs to the neurotic, for intimations of a personality.
Jenny Lewis voices her desires more directly: she names one song on Rabbit Fur Coat “Happy,” and reprises it as a 48-second coda. But she’s not quite as open as she seems. When she sings “happy” it comes out “happy-hee-hee-hee”–mocking the very idea of contentment even as the warm grain and supple contours of her voice suggest she’s found it. That’s the core tension in Rabbit Fur Coat: the push and pull between the physical pleasures of Lewis’s homey, often acoustic take on country soul and her self-critical lyrics. “Mostly I’m a hypocrite,” she admits on the title track, and the song exposes the gap between intention and action as expertly as “The Good That Won’t Come Out,” her withering take on the matter from Rilo Kiley’s 2002 The Execution of All Things. Even when Lewis berates bed-hopping pharisees and other sanctimonious frauds on “Rise Up With Fists!!” she’s self-aware, gliding into a chorus of “There but for the grace of God go I.”
