Cat Power - London Roundhouse - 1/11/06
5/5
By: Thomas Hannan
I've seen a few sides of the story. Yeah, I've seen Chan Marshall giggle into her own songs until they become shambolic, I've seen her too embarrassed to even finish them, I've seen it all crumble in to extended sessions of tuning up or going off on anecdotes for hours on end. But I've also seen it work. I've also seen Chan - Cat Power - completely lost in a song, enjoying the sound of her incredible voice and delicate compositions as much as anyone in the audience. I've not seen it like this.
She's confident. She has to be, to present something like this to fans who have come to expect the first of the situations I described. They'll even stick up for sets like that mess I saw as momentous, something I just don't 'get'. This is slick. This is polished. This is the Memphis Rhythm Band. This is a band who, as Cat Power's backing musicians, take all the pressure of performance away from the woman herself. They're consummate professionals. So all CP has to do is use the one thing that was never in doubt - her voice. She uses it brilliantly.
OK, so for the first part, she pretty much just plays 'The Greatest'. But that's what the band are for, and this is where she is now. It's an accurate snapshot, and besides, these are excellent musicians, and with that voice on top of it all it falls thankfully nearer 'Heart Attack and Vine' era Tom Waits than it does Jools Holland's Rhythm and Blues Orchestra. It could have gone either way. There was slap bass.
But these were Cat Power songs, and so they were still fragile even when a dozen people were playing them. It's a fragility that belongs to the woman herself though much more than it does the actual songs. Any frailty in the music is just something that's rubbed off from time spent near the creator. The band piss off stage for a bit, and Chan's left on her own. She's going for it - she's playing the most disturbing, sparse version of 'The House of the Rising Sun' you'll ever hear. She continues through more barely there compositions, getting lost in one of them, complaining she can't hear well enough. We clap. The Cat Power we knew is still in there, somewhere. Funny, though - we can hear her fine. The room's packed, and she's not even really using the microphone - standing a good five metres away from it and bellowing as loud as she physically can. It sounds INCREDIBLE.
Better, even, than the sparkling reworking of 'Nude At The News' going in to an invigoratingly sinister cover of The Rolling Stones' 'Satisfaction' that followed it. Better, even, than I've heard one woman with a guitar ever sound.
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