If you are an artist at a crossroads/ "maturing point" in your career, it's a great idea to seek out the original musicians who played on music you adore and that inspire you greatly?it's the opposite of what Rick Rubin does with the old folks. The results, however, are often lackluster; it can just be too hard to forge a connection in a short period of time with studio dudes twenty to thirty years older than you. Chan Marshall, who took just three years between albums this time, returned to Memphis to record with many of the architects of Southern soul music at Ardent Studios on The Greatest. And from the first and titular tune, a mournful and gorgeous ballad with swelling strings, backing singer and shimmery guitar accompaniment that tells the tale of a boy who wants to become a great boxer, it's clear that the results of this experiment are uniformly awesome. The sultry-voiced artiste sounds fully at home within these songs, these lovely analog Southern sounds that bridge black and white musics. It's not like she's on a trip of trying to be Aretha or anything; besides, the arrangements on all the songs are different. The loping, fiddle-accented "Empty Shell" sounds like the Unholy Modal Rounders backing Bobbie Gentry. All the songs are pretty, slow and melancholy; there's nothing like "He War" on here. We are not in the habit of quoting press releases, but it's hard to beat this line from the Matador one-sheet: "If Alex Chilton were today a beautiful young woman, he'd sound like this." Amen, or something. ?Mike McGonigal.
Review by Heather Phares
The Greatest (no, it's not a hits collection) makes it clear just how much Chan Marshall grows with each album she releases. Three years on from You Are Free, she sounds reinvented yet again: Marshall returned to Memphis, TN -- where she recorded What Would the Community Think nearly a decade earlier -- to make an homage to the Southern soul and pop she listened to as a young girl. Working with great Memphis soul musicians such as Mabon "Teenie" Hodges, Leroy "Flick" Hodges, and Dave Smith, she crafted an album that is even more focused and accessible than You Are Free was, and pushes her even closer toward straightforward singer/songwriter territory. The title track is a subtle but powerful statement of purpose: with its lush, "Moon River" strings and lyrics about a young boy who wanted to become a boxer, the song is as moving as her earlier work but also a big step away from the angst-ridden diary-rock that her music is sometimes categorized as. Likewise, on the gospel-tinged "Living Proof" and the charming "Could We," Marshall is sexy, strong, and playful, and far from the stereotype of her as a frail, howling waif. But the truth is, sweet Southern songs like these have been in her repertoire since What Would the Community Think's "They Tell Me" and "Taking People" (You Are Free's "Good Woman" and "Half of You" are also touchstones for this album); The Greatest is just a more polished, palatable version of this side of her music. This is the most listenable Cat Power album Marshall has made, and one that could easily win her lots of new fans. It's also far from a sell-out -- The Greatest sounds like the album Marshall wanted to make, without any specific (or larger) audience in mind. And yet, the very things about The Greatest that make it appealing to a larger audience also make it less singular and sublime than, say, Moon Pix or You Are Free. The productions and arrangements on songs like "Lived in Bars" and "Empty Shell" are so immaculate and intricate that they threaten to overwhelm Marshall's gorgeous voice. And, occasionally, the album's warm, soulful, laid-back vibe goes from mellow to sleepy, particularly on "Willie" and "The Moon." Two of The Greatest's best songs show that she doesn't need to be edgy and tortured or gussied up with elaborate productions to sound amazing: "Where Is My Love" reaffirms that all Marshall needs is a piano and that voice to make absolutely spellbinding music. On the other hand, "Love & Communication"'s modern, complicated take on love gains a quiet intensity with judiciously used strings and keyboards. For what it is, The Greatest is exceedingly well done, and people who have never heard of Cat Power before could very well love this album immediately. However, it might take a little more work for those who have loved her music from the beginning.
Cat Power
The Greatest
[Matador; 2006]
Rating: 7.9
The dirty little secret about Chan Marshall is that she may actually have her shit together. As a recent Harp magazine interview pointed out (in between Marshall's musings on interest rates, real estate, and finances), she's spent the past decade building a successful career without even employing a manager. It's a feat that few, if any, of her contemporaries have been able to pull off-- and given that, at this very moment, a significant portion of the indie music world is salivating for tomorrow's release of the seventh Cat Power record, it would seem she's pulled it off quite well.
Of course, the Cat Power allure has always been tied up in Marshall's notoriously seasick live performances. In 2001, the woman who jumped into the audience mid-performance and shoved me aside while tearfully fleeing the Irving Plaza stage certainly didn't seem capable of balancing a checkbook, let alone single-handedly negotiating a more generous contract with her record label (as the Harp article alleges). But then, the public-vs.-private tightrope-walk is as old as marketing itself: Johnny Cash never shot a man in Reno, either. Still, it's impossible to ignore the pull of the Beautifully Tortured stereotype, no matter what reality lies behind it. But if we didn't want Beautifully Tortured, we'd be obsessing over Norah Jones.
That brings us to The Greatest. Not to knock Norah, but she isn't tortured-- and neither is this album, which, if Nic Harcourt or VH1 get their hands on it, could be battling "Don't Know Why" for airplay supremacy on Mom's car stereo in the coming months. Like all Cat Power records, The Greatest is a mostly sad, heartbroken, hopeless, rainy-day affair; it just isn't damaged. For that reason, it's also going to gain her a lot of new fans.
The Greatest was recorded in Memphis, with several of that city's veteran studio musicians serving as her backing band, including Mabon "Teenie" Hodges on guitar, his brother Leroy "Flick" Hodges on bass, and Steve Potts on drums. These soul legends have played with Al Green, Booker T. and the MG's, Aretha Franklin, Neil Young, and more; in other words, they don't seem like the kind of dudes who'd stand much tortured diva bullshit from some no-name white girl off Matador Records. These are first-rate professionals, and their contributions-- a far cry from those of Steve Shelley and Dirty Three, or even Eddie Vedder and Dave Grohl-- add as much to the album as they detract.
The title song opens the album with the same halting, thick-fingered piano style Marshall has relied on since 2000's The Covers Record, but here it's swathed in Henry Mancini strings, teary delay effects, gently nudging drums, and Marshall's own multi-tracked voice echoing her lead vocals like Mary and Flo on the Supremes' loveliest ballads. "The Greatest", with its evocative lyrics of nostalgia and regret is, like "Colors and the Kids" and "Good Woman" before it, bleakness at its most pristine.
But Marshall doesn't wallow long, following the track with "Living Proof", Cat Power's most conventionally sexy song yet. As it swaggers on lazy horns and careening "Like a Rolling Stone" organ, you can almost picture Marshall in a pair of tight jeans, swinging her hips in front of a jukebox. "Lived in Bars" retains that Southern-fried sensuality in its back half: After beginning as a late-night smoky bar lament, the song lifts off on shoo-ba-doo harmonies and a bouncy beat; all of a sudden, it's getting hot and heavy in a pickup truck.
The marriage of Marshall's offbeat musical sensibility to her new backing band's in-the-pocket playing bears its most successful fruit on those three songs. At heart, they're smooth, accessible lite-R&B tracks-- as close to Chan in Memphis as the album gets. Still, if that's what adult-alternative sounds like in 2006, sign me up for the AARP.
But the middle chunk of The Greatest just feels old. It's beyond "adult": These songs seem musty and outdated, like stuff my grandparents might have danced to during The War. "Could We", "Empty Shell", "Islands", and "After It All" are all finger snaps and jazz hands, Marshall twirling her umbrella in the park as Fred Astaire woos her with clicked heels and a top hat. "Thank you/ It was great/ Let's make/ Another date/ Real soon/ In the afternoon," Marshall purrs over call-and-response horns and hotel bar piano. "After It All" even features whistling and the kind of cabaret melody Nellie McKay drops into a song right before she threatens to kill you.
Worse is "Where Is My Love", the album's rock-bottom low. Marshall moans the title ad infinitum (interspersed with "bring him to me" and stuff about horses galloping and running free) in some sort of high school musical approximation of Nina Simone. She's accompanied only by Cheez Whiz piano scales and those same heart-tugging strings from "The Greatest", only this time they sound creepily manipulative, not heartbreaking or beautiful. I envision Marshall in a fluffy white gown with a plunging neckline singing this song out of a balcony window. At the end, a dove lands on her outstretched finger. This is not what I want from Cat Power. It's not what I want from anybody, not even Norah Jones.
The Greatest regains its composure as it nears the finish line, ending with a pair of songs that wouldn't have seemed out of place on any Cat Power album since What Would the Community Think. "Hate", the only track that might scare off newcomers while delighting her original fanbase, is Marshall alone with her guitar, playing stark, cutting riffs, and murmuring "I hate myself and I want to die." "Love and Communication" is the album's first three tracks as viewed through a fun-house mirror: Instead of the Memphis crew welcoming Marshall into their world, the closing track sees Marshall luring the studio vets down her dark, claustrophobic alley. The strings, horns, and organs press forward in deliberate staccato stabs, advancing on the ear as if programmed by Dr. Dre.
The biggest challenge of this album isn't going to be commercial success; just stick "Could We" on the soundtrack to a hip romantic comedy, and it'll take off on its own. The difficult part will be proving to longtime fans that Chan Marshall is the one in control here. She's made an album that, for the most part, is polished and accessible. For better or worse, she's stretched her musical horizons far beyond the close-knit indie rock world-- a world that likely doesn't want her to change.
-Amy Phillips, January 23, 2006
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