Chan "Cat Power" Marshall's performances have become legendary marathons marked by Marshall's shyness and her ability to create moments of fragmented beauty. Five years on from her last collection of original songs, 1998's Moon Pix, Marshall has reined in the silvery brilliance of her shows. The 14 pieces on You Are Free maintain a spontaneity, but, compared with their digressive live incarnations, they've been given focus--a development that owes something to a notable supporting cast that includes Dave Grohl on drums and Eddie Vedder on vocals. Marshall's impressionistic vision is expressed with a new clarity while retaining its affecting understatement and sense of dislocation. Her past kinship with Bonnie Prince Billy and Smog gives way to PJ Harvey and Nina Simone comparisons. You Are Free confirms that Marshall is one of the most original and compelling singer-songwriters around. --John Mulvey
Cat Power
You Are Free
[Matador; 2003]
Rating: 8.9
Liz Phair was a grifter. Using sexuality as a weapon, she turned the tables on obsessive boys and set their hearts aflutter with brazen lyrics, from the flagellant lust of "Flower" to her dead-to-the-world praise for doin' it doggie-style, "That way we can fuck and watch TV." Yet, forgiving a few heartfelt ballads like "Explain It to Me", Phair was in many ways a coy tease, partying and watching porn with guys she'd never date, despite their lust for her.
Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power) was never such fun, never crude or masculine; she's the opposite fantasy, the porcelain art-school doll whose blissful confusion you could never hold in your hands. She's the girl that never called you back, that made you lose your cool and leave two messages. Every time you see her on the street, or a mutual friend tells you, "Yeah, I saw her at Cokie's, she's dating the guy from so and so," it ruins your weekend.
The cagiest of modern songbirds, Chan has a famously fragile ego and skittish countenance. She's wrestled with the consequences of baring a relentlessly observant soul to the world, and bagged on any number of shows when heckled or simply "not feeling it." What fame she currently enjoys is due in large part to the fallout from those freakouts, the reputation of being "crazy," and it's absolute bullshit. The Problem With Music doesn't have as much to do with the influence of corporations or digital piracy as it does the delirious desire to be spat upon or condescended to by seemingly unflappable, fuck-everything rebels, projecting a confidence their sycophantic fans wish they could muster. Kids want to see their dreams onstage-- which used to be harmless-- but cool, cold fantasies about credibility, cash and chaos have given rise to an increasingly cocksure collection of unserious dopes with store-bought sticky-up hair. It's a solid indication that pose is still prose to the uneducated, and that nothing has really changed in fifty years.
Unlike most celebrities-- evidence her fall 2001 fashion spread in New York magazine-- Chan Marshall is unrecognizable from one photo to the next. One moment she's a giddy fourteen year-old; the next, she's withdrawn, wary and wise, the music world's Juliette Binoche. Recently, she's Nico. Whether anxiety, insecurity, substance abuse or all three are to blame, few artists have gone through as much physical change without plastic surgery. In person, Marshall's face undulates with each syllable, conveying a vast range of emotions in a single inflection. When she's singing, however, it's an entirely different story: Ms. Power is a siren on stage, a shepherdess, gently coaxing words across indefinite miles of memory before tenderly putting them to pasture, or unleashing whatever betrayal they carry in tow. She's a representative for all manner of loss and regret, and serves us in good stead on You Are Free.
1998's Moon Pix set the stage for a hugely promising follow-up, but Chan missed the side of that barn: The Covers Record was a dashed off, carefree run through the classics, a placeholder for creativity she was unable to channel. In hindsight, it's a good thing she didn't record any new material after the mostly disastrous Moon Pix tour. There's an overt irony to The Covers Record insofar as Chan hid under them for a few years.
Those days-- the sad days, the manic, childish days-- seem very long gone, as Cat Power reclaims her history, potential and allure in this collection of impressionist vignettes, hampered by a few flat numbers and some awkwardly totemic (though entirely expected) nods to Joni Mitchell. "I Don't Blame You" is one of the latter, Chan's pining letter to Kurt Cobain that also serves as a third-person apology to self, the sort of thing addicts and those new to therapy pen on admission. She uses the opening slot as a mostly disconnected salvo, only slipping into this sort of nudity once more, on the brutal "Names", which is either a public service announcement against child abuse or an honest recollection of tragedies Chan Marshall witnessed growing up.
"He War" enjoyed most of the advance praise for this album, posted in digital preview form on her record label's website. This pounding centerpiece is second only to PJ Harvey's "Big Exit" in the canon of Heart tributes, but it carries in tow the stilted tempo and clean electric guitars dominating indie rock since Guided by Voices came on the scene. Beyond nominally decrying the Quixotic male impulse that fuels her oeuvre, "He War" underscores how remarkable Marshall's voice is, turning an otherwise pedestrian, technically amateur tune into an assured rock anthem draped in sonorous, shrill wails. The tune proves a worthy successor to the detached, bemused innocence of "Cross Bones Style", whose referentially genius video broke Cat Power to a wider audience.
Marshall scribbles a Crayola-colored, daydreamt recollection of the phony-tough cock-rock that ruled the radios of her youth on "Free", a moment of stylistic daring that incorporates a deadened drum machine snare with urgent (think Foreigner here) strumming. It's the sound of a more attuned, sensitive kid finding her way in the dark, and the only song on You Are Free to risk disaster, openly toying with SK-1 keys and a guitar lead unintentionally pinched from the Talking Heads' tongue-in-cheek "Wild Wild Life". The gamble pays off, and just two songs into the album, it's clear that Chan's taken its title to heart.
The Cat Power we've come to know, love, and predict finally delivers that glistening, trebly rasp on "Good Woman", a ballad backed by Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis, as well as a compressed chorale of soprano vocal doubling. Eddie Vedder's presence on You Are Free is both appropriate and gentle given his unmistakable coo. You'll recognize it-- and for anyone still mired in divisive squabbling, his breathy moan could ruin the record-- but the two duets with Vedder are the strongest of too many funereally morose dirges that bind the album.
"Speak for Me" transports anyone who lived through Pavement's ascendancy back to the breathless expectancy in advance of Wowee Zowee, something Cat Power also felt: she's covered "We Dance" since just after that record came out. The playful backbeat chorus and toy pianos of "Speak for Me" are partnered with another throwback, this time to Chan's low-fidelity roots. Her cover of Michael Hurley's two-chord country blues number "Werewolf" is abbreviated from rambling, epic versions you may have heard in concert, and though it's aided by David Campbell's string arrangements (reminiscent of Carter Burwell's soundtrack work), it could lay in next to anything from Marshall's earlier Myra Lee LP. "Fool" makes a perfect counterpoint to "Werewolf", in terms of Chan's maturation where songwriting, production and subject matter are concerned. Her disdain is getting personal, her subject matter less ephemeral, as she scolds rich Americans driven by wanderlust and entitlement. With haunting harmonies and a teasing pause, the chorus tugs at the heartstrings of twenty-something confusion.
For the stunning variety and intrigue of its first eight songs, the second half of You Are Free is spotty, and a draining letdown. As the old adage goes, ten songs is an album, and in this case, fourteen is a few too many. Some of the closing tracks should have been kept back for B-sides; the overwrought, repetitive "Half of You" is a less meaningful pastiche than the searing Western blues heard earlier on the record, and "Maybe Not" is basically an alternate piano take on "Fool".
Chan's been playing the frayed Joni Mitchell card in advance of You Are Free, and it's starting to wear thin. The two real missteps here are "Baby Doll", a too-simple nylon guitar plod, and a fantastic but hiss-coated cover of John Lee Hooker's "Crawlin' Black Spider" (reappropriated as "Keep on Runnin'", surely as a stab at her former lover, Smog's Bill Callahan). Again, this cover is outstanding on its own merits, but interrupts the album, forestalling the icy chill of its stupendous finale, "Evolution".
The monotonous, glacial insistence of You Are Free's last track-- Cat Power's proper duet with Eddie Vedder-- is as out of place as its opener, a perfect bookend and resolution to a record that almost effortlessly shifts between incongruous styles. Vedder appears in hushed baritone, nicely meshing with the piano line and allowing Chan's tongue-tied, sedated lilt to sit on top. "Evolution" is as poetic a retelling of moral apocalypse as you're likely to come by, insofar as it ignores melodramatic conviction and the temporal impulse to wax politic. This is pure Hemingway.
You Are Free is full of arresting, serene beauty, but as an album-- as that quantifiable object-- it has composite failings. Sans a handful of lesser inclusions and tributes, the imaginary, shorter version of You Are Free is flawless. An unknown singer would take the apologist underground by storm with a record like this, but fame brings expectation and accountability, and certain people are going to be disappointed for the wrong reasons. You Are Free is not a perfect record, but it contains one, detailing the sound of American regret with a singular voice, scrutinized only because of its owner.
-Chris Ott, February 18, 2003
Review by Heather Phares
You Are Free arrives nearly five years from her last album of original material, and everything, yet nothing, has changed about Chan Marshall's music. The album's title is as much a statement as it is a challenge, a command to free one's self from the hurt and pain of the past, or to at least find a way of making peace with it. Marshall seems to do both on You Are Free, a collection of songs about finding freedom and peace wherever she can. Initially, the album seems more diffuse than Moon Pix, as it spans tense rockers, blues, folk, and singer/songwritery piano ballads, but it gradually reveals itself as Marshall's most mature and thematically focused work yet. You Are Free opens with a stunning trio of songs that encompass most of the moods and sounds she explores later in the album. On "I Don't Blame You," the first of You Are Free's many spare, piano-driven moments, Marshall paints a portrait of a tormented musician, her voice so full of sympathy that she may well be singing a reconciliation to a previous incarnation of herself. The brisk, buzzing intensity of "Free," however, offers liberation in the form of rock & roll's immediate, poetic nonsense: "Don't be in love with the autograph/Just be in love when you love that song all night long." You Are Free's first two songs address musicians and making music directly; Marshall is a famously willful, volatile artist, and the increasing gaps between her albums (not to mention her unpredictable live performances) suggest that being a musician isn't the easiest thing for her to do, even if it's a necessary one. She addresses the struggle to do the right, but difficult, thing on "Good Woman," a near-spiritual breakup song where, backed by a children's choir and fiddles, Marshall explains that she needs to be a good woman with -- or more likely, without -- her bad man. Aside from being a lovely song, it's also a departure; earlier in her career the song might have just focused on the conflict instead of Marshall's gently strong resolution to it. This gentle but resolute strength runs through most of You Are Free's best moments, such as "He War" and especially "Names," a terrifyingly matter-of-fact recollection of child abuse and lost friends that says more in its resigned sorrow than a histrionic tirade would. As the album progresses, it moves toward the spare, affecting ballads that give her later work a strange timelessness; listening to You Are Free gives the impression of stripping away layers to get to the essence of Marshall's music. In some ways, the quiet last half of this album is more demanding than the angsty noise of Dear Sir or Myra Lee, but hearing her find continually creative interpretations of minor keys, plaintive pianos, and folky guitars is well worth the attention it takes, whether it's the dead-of-night eroticism of her cover of Michael Hurley's "Werewolf," the pretty yet eerie longing of "Fool," or the prairie romance of "Half of You." Every Cat Power album takes at least a few listens to fully reveal itself; You Are Free may take awhile longer than expected to unfold, but once it does, its excellence is undeniable.
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