Cat Power - You Are Free
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Artist: Cat PowerEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Original Language)
CD Release Date: 2003-02-18
Music Label: Matador Records
Soundtracks:
- Dont Blame You
- Free
- Good Woman
- Speak For Me
- Werewolf
- Fool
- He War
- Shaking Paper
- Babydoll
- Maybe Not
- Names
- Half Of You
- Keep On Running
- Evolution
Free Music Notes for You Are Free
Free Music Review: Cat Powerful
Hit: 5 Stars
Back in high school, they all said she'd amount to nothing. She was different, aloof, always reading or writing something, but never anything she had been assigned. She ran with a small but select group of social bottom-feeders, all of whom spent prom nights watching old Audrey Hepburn flicks and ingesting contraband substances. Her schoolwork was characterized by teachers as solid but unexceptional, willfully outside the lines and from a world of its own. Her worst grades were in art, based solely on her absolute refusal to create the requisite deer and antelope scenes required by the art teacher (who doubled as the shop teacher). In short, high school was something for her to endure, to get through before real life started.Ten years later, the jocks and cheerleaders of yesteryear are frightened at what's beginning to show. Many have become their parents, mired in babies and bills. She's since moved on, too, and done fine for herself. She put down her paintbrushes once upon a time and started strumming a guitar. She moved around a bit and saw some things. She decided to make rock and roll music, and started a band consisting of herself and no one else and called it Cat Power. This, at least, is how I see her, whose name is Chan Marshall. Parts of the story may be true or none of it at all. What can be said for sure is that she has always forged a musical path that can be described as nothing if not passionately independent. On You Are Free, her first album of new material in four years, she takes this a step further, setting a new standard for herself and her contemporaries.
From the start, You Are Free is a stripped down affair, with songs pared down to the essentials. Marshall's songs have always had a bare feel to them, but these songs make use of every element they're left to work with-and with astounding results. Whether it's just Marshall's all-nighter with gin & tonic voice paired with electric guitar, or the groaned tenor of none other than Eddie Vedder (identified only as E.V. in the liner notes) sitting somewhere below the piano lines, nothing here is superfluous. Marshall oscillates back and forth between personas resembling Joni Mitchell: piano-based, plaintive introspection; and Joan Jett for the intellectual set: breaking out the electric guitars with strut and sass. The remarkable part is that she's so much at home in each.
Maybe the best example of the latter is found in the sort of like the title track, "Free." This is a delectable little slice of retro yet modern pop, a teaser that stops and starts with the help of an electronic snare that lasts exactly six beats at a time before retreating back to the 1983 from whence it came. The stripped down production gives the song a skeletal, retro vibe that somehow sounds fresher than anything around, a la the last couple of Spoon records. It also calls to mind some of the best recordings to come out of the late 70's/ early 80's: Talking Heads, Elvis Costello & the Attractions and, oddly, Blondie.
Other highlights include the spooky rendition of Michael Hurley's "Werewolf," a foreboding cello spelling out doom on what is soon destined to be a Halloween standard. Also of note are "Good Woman," featuring a barely audible, yet effective Vedder along with a muted choir of adolescent girls; and "Maybe Not," a chilling piano-based composition that Marshall delivers in such a personal tone that it leaves you feeling as if maybe you weren't meant to be listening.
The notion of "freedom" pops up consistently on You Are Free, although it's not the same vague notion of "freedom" that has been unfortunately present in all sorts of misguided musical attempts since Sept. 11. Cat Power's "freedom" seems, instead, to be about a freedom of transcendence of mind, a freedom to think critically about whatever is presented to us. Perhaps this credits the music with too much importance that was never intended to be there in the first place, but you've got to take these things where you can get them these days. Only a cynic could disbelieve when Marshall sings, "we can all be free/ maybe not in words/ maybe not in look/ but in your mind..." The big picture has never sounded so good.
The power of the feline proves impressive; one of the top releases of 2003. 9.2 out of 10.
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