Cat Power - The Greatest
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Cat PowerEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2007-03-20
Music Label: Matador Records
Soundtracks:
- The Greatest
- Living Proof
- Lived In Bars
- Could We
- Empty Shell
- Willie
- Where Is My Love
- The Moon
- Islands
- After It All
- Hate
- Love And Communication
Free Music Notes for The Greatest
Free Music Review: Who says this isn't a greatest hits album?
Hit: 5 Stars
Matador records keeps pointing out to anyone who cares that The Greatest isn't supposed to be a greatest hits album. Oh yeah? Well with songs this good, it might as well be. This album is filled with quite a fine selection of Chan Marshall's R&B, soul, and country-flavored numbers. One of the previous reviewers suggested this is an acoustic album. That is incorrect. The songs are performed by a full studio band (electric guitars and bass, Hammond organ, drums, horns etc). The songs are well written, well arranged, well produced, and performed by the kind of studio pros that most any artist playing Stax-era R&B would be proud to have. Best of all, Marshall's voice has never sounded better.
This album is overflowing with winners: "Living Proof", "Willie", "Lived in Bars", "Where is my Love", "Love & Communication", "Could We", "The Moon". Even the B-list songs are still pretty good. I'm even willing to forgive an old styled Cat Power song like "Hate", with Marshall playing one of her signature cloddish guitar parts. I mean, the rest of the album is so good; who cares if she wants to goof around on her crappy Silvertone for a couple minutes while the tape rolls and the band takes a break?
My only real complaint is that some songs are too short. When you get a great rhythm and horn section going on a song like "Could We" you don't pack up shop after 2:21 minutes. Let the horn players take a solo. Let the Telecaster guy or the Hammond B3 guy take a wack at it for a few bars. Build up to a crescendo and then drop back down. For heaven's sake, go back and listen to your Booker T and the MGs albums a couple more times--you'll see what I mean.
Another small quibble is too many songs are built around a single unchanging progression. A cool song like "The Moon", with its rotating Leslie speaker vibe, is robbed of some drama because there are no breaks or changes. Marshall's career-long love of repetative song structures is too reductive, particularly when she's got a really great band like this one.
I've spent the last few months working my way through the entire Cat Power catalog only to discover she really has nothing else like this album. The Covers Record has hints of this album--with pared down covers of folk and country blues songs. Her remaining albums are a different world entirely. Some are better than others, but virtually everything that ever bothered me about previous Cat Power albums is fixed in The Greatest (above all, Marshall has focused on writing and singing while allowing better musicians to handle the accompaniments).
As much as I like the album, I recognize The Greatest is not for everyone. Fans who prefer the haunted pathos, disorder, and rawness of the Moon Pix era (as well as the sense of an album long suicide note) will miss the old Cat Power sound. There's nothing on this album that sounds like "Metal Heart", "Nude as the News", "Rockets", or "He War". Well, actually there's "Hate". But a single old-style song out of an entire album may not be very satisfactory.
On the other hand, if you appreciate vintage 60's and 70's era soulful R&B, you've come to the right place. Marshall has a top notch band and a voice to match. If you could mix Bobby Gentry with maybe a touch of folk singer Sandy Denny and a hint of Janice Joplin, you'd have something that sounded pretty good indeed. To my ears, that exactly what you have with Marshall's singing on The Greatest.
The Greatest Poster
This is not a greatest hits album, despite the title. It contains all-original songs written by Chan Marshal (professionally known as Cat Power), and features the great Memphis session musicians Teenie Hodges on guitar, Leroy Hodges on bass (Al Green, Hi Rhythm Section), drummer Steve Potts, and more. The combination of Marshall's superbly evocative and flexible voice plus some of the greatest Southern soul players, has produced a masterpiece. These songs explore themes of Southern loss, longing, and marginality. The limited first digipak pressing and regular single vinyl contain a bonus track. After the first pressing sells out, the regular jewelcase version will not contain a bonus track.If you are an artist at a crossroads/ "maturing point" in your career, it's a great idea to seek out the original musicians who played on music you adore and that inspire you greatly?it's the opposite of what Rick Rubin does with the old folks. The results, however, are often lackluster; it can just be too hard to forge a connection in a short period of time with studio dudes twenty to thirty years older than you. Chan Marshall, who took just three years between albums this time, returned to Memphis to record with many of the architects of Southern soul music at Ardent Studios on The Greatest. And from the first and titular tune, a mournful and gorgeous ballad with swelling strings, backing singer and shimmery guitar accompaniment that tells the tale of a boy who wants to become a great boxer, it's clear that the results of this experiment are uniformly awesome. The sultry-voiced artiste sounds fully at home within these songs, these lovely analog Southern sounds that bridge black and white musics. It's not like she's on a trip of trying to be Aretha or anything; besides, the arrangements on all the songs are different. The loping, fiddle-accented "Empty Shell" sounds like the Unholy Modal Rounders backing Bobbie Gentry. All the songs are pretty, slow and melancholy; there's nothing like "He War" on here. We are not in the habit of quoting press releases, but it's hard to beat this line from the Matador one-sheet: "If Alex Chilton were today a beautiful young woman, he'd sound like this." Amen, or something. ?Mike McGonigal
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