CAT POWER
You Are Free
Matador
· Purr purr. Meow.
Chan Marshall has always been the elusive type. Recording under the name Cat Power, she has spun the dual poles of Joni Mitchell and Kim Gordon, equally at home in a gentle acoustic strum and in the lap of white noise. That The Covers Record was somehow her most personal and revealing album – you can tell an awful lot about someone from their favourite songs – says much about Cat Power’s enigmatic arms-length distance from her audience. Whereas label-mate Liz Phair shows no qualms about opening up her closets in explicit detail, Cat Power has always remained as unspecific as possible, lest someone read into her lyrics looking for autobiographical disclosure.
On the shimmering "Good Woman," moments into her latest record You Are Free, Marshall states her mandate simply: "I want to be a good woman." Backed by her own gorgeous step-ladder guitar overtop a David Campbell string arrangement and Warren Ellis’s characteristic violin sturm und drang, "Good Woman" is Cat Power’s definitive missive.
Marshall will always be far more comfortable singing "you" than "I," but her voice resonates where it really counts – in "we" and "us," where You Are Free makes its continual promise that everyone, the whole lot of us, can all be free. Be it the truck-stop hymnals "Half Of You" and "Babydoll," or the Liz Phair-style rockers "He War" and "Shaking Paper," Cat Power has never sounded so certain.
Sure, there are the occasional lyrical gaffes (particularly "Names," with its cornball stories of ghosts from Marshall’s past, and "I Don’t Blame You," which is easily interpreted as a too-little-too-late ode to Kurt Cobain), but at least her words are honest. Musically, Marshall may not be the world’s most gifted player, but You Are Free is an album so self-assured that every mistake sounds entirely intentional.
A long time coming, You Are Free is Cat Power’s first altogether cohesive and complete record – and it’s a truly great one at that.
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