NEW ALBUMS
CAT POWER
Covers DOMINO
Singing not drowning – Chan Marshall’s spontaneous jukebox.
By Alastair McKay
Chan Marshall: dreamy Catchoruses of Auto-Tune
MARIO SORRENTI
8/10
A COVER can be a disguise or a source of warmth. Or it can be someone else’s song. For Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power, all definitions apply. Ask her to explain the process of choosing which songs to record on her third album of covers and she will respond with a rush of consciousness that mirrors the way the record was made.
Some of the songs evolved through live performance, sometimes as reactions to Marshall’s own compositions. She took to singing Frank Ocean’s “Bad Religion” as an antidote to performing “In Your Face” (from 2018’s Wanderer) on tour, seeing it as a way of not getting pulled down by the weight of her own composition. Clearly, the line between resilience and despair is drawn in chalk, because “Bad Religion” is a confessional about a long night of the soul, with a taxi driver in the role of therapist, or at least an empathetic pair of ears. In Ocean’s version, the religious imagery is foregrounded by the arrangement. Ocean’s driver is Muslim, and the cultural awkwardness he described prompted some wayward interpretations of the lyrics. Marshall swerves this by having her cabbie say “praise the Lord” rather than “Allahu akbar”, a tweak that rewires one of the song’s oscillations between self-pity and prejudice.