Chan Marshall makes the phrase “never two without three” her own with the release of covers. So, for the third time – after The Covers Record, in 2000, and Jukebox, in 2008 -, the one known under the stage name of Cat Power allows herself a new album of covers. This time, the musical reappropriation carried out by the “veteran” of the American rock scene comes from the catalogs of Frank Ocean, Lana Del Ray, The Pogue, Jackson Browne, The Replacements, Nick Cave, Nico, Iggy Pop, Billie Holiday and… Cat Power itself.
Posted yesterday at 9:30 a.m.
Yes, the spectrum is broad. Through this perilous exercise – too often, cover albums are only pale copies of the originals – Chan Marshall pays tribute to the singers and bands who marked his youth and those who are still present in his artistic life.
Obviously, the comparison between the first songs and the covers concocted by Cat Power is inevitable. But she manages to titillate the ears of the listeners partly thanks to the originality of the arrangements. We think about the proofreading of bad religion, by Frank Ocean. Cat Power surprises, adding to it the scores – accelerated and digitized – of one of his own compositions (In Your Face, heard on Wanderer, released in 2018) to support the text of Ocean.
If a few pieces in the center of covers seem too similar to the originals and thus lack color and freshness – we found the covers ofEndless Sea, Iggy Pop, and It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels, by Kitty Wells – the musical curtain falls in a beautiful way, with the rereadings at the end of the course of I Had a Dream Joe, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Here Comes a Regular, The Replacements, and I’ll Be Seeing You, by Billie Holiday, all three of which deserve many listens.
Rock/Covers
covers
cat-power
Domino Records