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.

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