Cat Power – Jukebox
I have tried and tried and tried again to like Cat Power and there is one inescapable conclusion I can manage: I am not just ‘not getting it’, she is just fucking unimaginative, uninspired and dull. Lounge, souley, mellow blues MOR is all very well but even with a set of memorable tunes such as these it ends up sounding like a bloody novelty album. What this is is no more than very posh, elaborate and well-funded karaoke.
Basically, I know it might been seen as snobbery to say so, but if these muppets on reality programs show us anything it’s that there are millions of otherwise talentless muppets out there who can really sing. Throwing a sly cover onto an album is one thing, and playing an unexpected one at a gig is another, but releasing a whole album of them is just plain self-indulgent. I know that Ella and her lot all sang other people’s songs and that it is only since the Beatles that we have required our pop music to be penned by the band themselves.
So am I saying that Ella Fitzgerald was a lesser artist for not writing her own music? Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Why do you think Kylie came storming back into fashion so notably? A cunning stylist and, most importantly, she shelled out for some really memorable tunes – Spinning Around, Can’t Get You Out of My Head – these are excellent pop songs upon which she depends for the career she has now. Writing songs that stick in people’s heads or impact on their emotions is the hard part.
Trotting out an album of other people’s songs and, by virtue of your own particularly bland and lifeless style of music, turning them into one indistinguishable, homogeneous mulch is just utterly pointless. Do not buy this album, it’s shit.
Cat Power – Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again
The Pierces – Boring
As the Interveb Nazis are not allowing sharing of this music in order to keep its mediocrity a secret from potential dupes for as long as possible I can’t even play you anything off it to demonstrate my point. So here’s one of hers off the soundtrack to the recent Dylan biopic as well as another song I thought was rather appropriately titled.
website | hype | buy the album
With you 100% & then some.
To be fair to Ms Power, but not that fair, she has done this before so it shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise she’s gone done another whole album of covers. It did, despite the dubious content, get her name repeatedly mentioned in reverential tones of bloggers & musi-mags alike. It made her the uncomfortable cult she is today.
What should be noted, though, is how achnigly fucking bland it all is (as was her first effort, as mentioned, a few years back). Gothic Americana it may pigeon-holed be, but it’s fucking consumately boring.
Sit back, then, & wait for the backlash…
)
Oh, & one other thing — that fucking cover & that title, sheesh.
Apart from it saying, quite nauseatingly, ME it reminds me of one of those God-awful ’70s albums, with very dodgy “Not By The Original Artist”, that culminated in the Top of The Pops series with a half-naked woman on the cover to draw in the unsuspecting, not getting it at home, dads.
Did I not mention that I thought it was boring? That too – somehow she has managed to make all the songs sound the bloody same. How the bollocks has she managed that?
Well DC, she is a bit fit though
Like Newsom: fit and boring and somehow appeals to middle-class white male bloggers. Fetch me Sherlock Holmes, we have a mystery fit only for the greatest detective mind ever to have walked the planet!
I haven’t really followed Cat Power since the Covers Album, which I quite liked actually, but I still listen to her 1998 record Moon Pix, and it means a great deal to me. There are a few songs on that record (“He Turns Down,” “Say,” and “Back of Your Head” to name a few) that are just heartbreakingly poignant and beautifully arranged. All tunes written by the lovely Ms. Marshall herself, by the way (exept “Moonshiner,” a traditional song that she renders in gorgeous style), or in collaboration with Mick Turner and Jim White of Dirty Three, who also played guitar and drums on the record. Listen to Moon Pix before you completely make up your mind about Cat Power. She was fucking briliiant once.
wrong. grow some ears.
BOOOOOOORING!
I don’t know that one C&B, but given your track record I shall certainly make the effort to seek it out and have a go.
(The ‘boring’ comment was for that paedo chracter, obviously enough.)
“Like Newsom: fit and boring and somehow appeals to middle-class white male bloggers.”
Great observation. Also applies to most ‘rock’ music crits who write for the British broadsheets (aprticularly the Sunday versions). Others to whom said observation applies include new female talents highlighted in the classical music sections (think Vanessa Mae and her ilk – is she really a better violinist than others or is it her picture on the sleeve that makes folk buy the Cd?)
I reckon Holmes & Watson would conclude that Ms Newsom and Ms Catpower are mere con-artists manipulating the vulnerability of sad, comfortable tossers too embarrased to visit porn sites on t’net or to reach up to the top shelf for a magazine or two.
Not that I’m saying music should be the sole preserve of the ugly…
It just pisses me off nowadays that perfect features and teeth, rather than talent, are a pre-requisite for sympathetic coverage in the media in just about any field you care to mention. But particularly music and other performing arts.
I’ll get off my sopbox at this juncture.
Oh, you might have picked up that musically, I’m left very cold by Catpower.
sopbox??? Jesus H, my spelling is getting even worse than normal…..
I think you might be going a little far there JC. I don’t think they themselves are in any way to blame for not being very interesting musicians, and certainly not for exploiting anyone. I think we blokes, and indie kids in particular, have a tendency to be way, way more shallow than we pretend to be. I blame us, not them.
yep. beige.
although speaking for trees is often a salve for my hungover eyes and ears.
and i have no idea what joanna newsom looks like ((okay i just googled her)and thats not a euphemism) but i do so enjoy her records.
is anyone really listening to what some goddam broadsheet critic’s punting anyways? hardly purveyors of cultural markers are they. if yr buying music on the basis of some guardian writer and/or chick hotness you are a fucking retard.
personally i think she sells and gets written about coz it is easy and safe and MOR not coz she’s fit.
Totally agree with you. I’ve tried and tried to like Cat Power as well, but I just CAN’T. I’ve wasted money on three of her albums, and out of all of them, there are maybe three or four songs I like. Not a good ratio. Most of them are boring and uninspired.
I agree, I just don’t get what people see in her.
BTW – glad to see *someone* is posting music they don’t like. Last time I did that, I had an angry virtual mob surround me.
Newsom has a quirky yet cherubic face, permanently ruddied from the cold wind of worrying about barley crops, barn spiders & jackdaw nests. She’s a tad Amish, in that American settler/Little House on The Prairie sense of goshdarn innocence & wonder — but, I bet she’ll gobble your Johnson in the stables ater the barndance is over.
Gosh, well I’m surprised. I rather suspected I’d get slaughtered for this. I agree though, Marx, it is inoffensive enough to be wildly popular. For bloody shame.
And Dean, if it’s newsworthy and I am interested in it myself then I will post about it. I am not going to dig up a new band just to slag them off though.
I got a promo of the Cat Power album and, yes, it’s fucking awful, bland mush. Joanna Newsom, on the other hand, and speaking as a middle-class white male blogger, is a genius (and quite fit). I really don’t know how you can compare the two.
Bill Callahan (aka Smog) has apparently made the intimate acquaintance of both Chan Marshall and Joanna Newsom. Now who’s “fit”?!
As I’ve said, I haven’t really followed Cat Power for the last 8 years or so, but I must say that Joanna Newsom’s appeal is absolutely lost on me. That voice! Half old lady, half little girl, makes me think of nothing so much as having a car battery dropped on my scrotum. Ys? More like Sheesh. I suppose she plays the harp well enough, but she must never be allowed to sing in public again.
Ooh, two diametrically opposed comments to respond to.. er.. *squirms* .. um .. er.. *bottles it* … YOU’RE BOTH RIGHT!
Nah, not really. Mr. Ledge, excellent to see you around these parts again. Must say I liked your end of year list. As to Joanna Newsom, I don’t know, I’ve just never quite understood the appeal. Mind you I haven’t tried that hard. Cat Power I’ve really tried to like and failed, so maybe Ms. Newsom might bear a little more determined investigation…
…which brings us neatly onto C&B’s comment (snigger). That’s a touching tale, almost like an indie version of that be-dreadlocked clown from the Counting Crows who bagged the entire female cast of friends, back at a time when that might actually have been considered an achievement.
…that be-dreadlocked clown from the Counting Crows who bagged the entire female cast of friends…
At the same time?! I missed that episode.
I thought if I was going to post on this thread I better at least listen to the tracks.
Never listened to this girl, and I’m always reluctant to jump on a bandwagon, but fuck me that Dylan cover is fucking abysmal, isn’t it?
It really is the worst kind of utterly soul-less Radio-2 MOR session-muzak.. And how long is it?!! It’s still fucking going and I started typing this just after the first verse!
Does she always do a stupid Bob Dylan impression or is it just for this song?!!
That lead guitarist is shit, too.
Heh heh. I wrote this post thinking I was going to get absolutely caned by the indie police. It appears, instead, that I have inadvertently opened up a can of worms.
Yes Dylan, it’s dull. Even Tim at The Daily Growl, who liked The Greatest doesn’t like it.
The Greatest is actually quite a good record, Mr. Toad, if a tad coffee table in places.
Well C&B has sent me a copy of Moon Pix so I will have a listen on Monday and see if I don’t perhaps need to modify my opinions slightly.
you ought to read linda’s review of this very same album over at speed of dark. she’s quite a fan of ms. chan.
I actually quite like Ms Power – and I really liked “The Greatest”, her last album. But then, I quite liked Charlotte Gainsbourg’s album too, which has a similar etheral-vocal, coffee table vibe.
Oh well. Each to there own, eh?
See, I nearly, nearly got into Charlotte Gainsbourg as well, just didn’t quite love it exactly. Who knows how these things work. Have you heard Charlotte Gainsbourg’s gorgeous cover of Just Like a Woman for the I’m Not There soundtrack? It’s amazing.
I’m not sure why you can be such a matey mate with someone who has the audacity to name a blog ‘the indie credential’. What utter wank.
You are completely wrong about both Chan Marshall and Joanna Newsom. Cat Power’s first covers record was absolutely amazing, and despite the fact that ‘the Greatest’ was rather bland, if anything her latest album is a return to form. And yes, ‘Moonpix’ is fucking good.
As for Joanna Newsom, you can’t really deny that she has a particularly impressive penmanship – the song ‘Swansea’ for instance is quite similar in structure and verse to much of the work of WB Yeats. She is a captivating live performer and recording artist who doesn’t deserve to suffer the ignorance of yourself or your high horse riding readership.
Your drunken rant was rubbish and you should actually just take it down.
Peace though.
Peace indeed, old fellow.
Joanna Newsom’s voice sounds like a cross between Morrissey and Bjork.
Which is not a good thing.
Haha! What a weird and yet oddly illuminating comparison!