Flak Magazine: Cat Power's You Are Free, 03.20.03

Late winter 2003 is a horribly twitchy and lonely time to be alive. War, (the threat of) terrorism, new viruses, old familiar starvation and uneasy techno-neuroses crowd the borders of our waking nightmares like murmuring ghosts. Chan Marshall's ears perk at these sounds, too, and her latest Cat Power release, You Are Free, dares to whisper our fears aloud, to shout at (then retreat from) the vague urban demons who moan along the sidewalks of our lost thoroughfares.

These universal themes don't necessarily attract a universal audience, and Cat Power is not for everyone. But those of us who didn't flinch from the creepily intimate voice, the polarized emotional tension and the spare, pained melodic structures of earlier work will gather here: bored, curious, distracted, hopeful, wary. Superficially, at least, this album is not a significant departure from the Cat Power oeuvre. And yet... and yet...

Opening with a piano motif reminiscent of some awkward prepubescent ballet rehearsal, "I Don't Blame You" unravels the deceptively straightforward strand of emotional immediacy without preamble. This big-hearted lullaby to a fallen peer ("the last time I saw you/ you were on stage/ your hair was wild/ your eyes were bright/ and you were in a rage/ you were swinging your guitar around/ cuz they wanted to hear that sound/ that you didn't wanna play") who once wrestled famously with large-scale stage fright is respectful in its refusal to name its target, yet equally suggestive of Marshall's own notoriously similar struggles. Her frail, echoed self-harmonies in the chorus ("I don't blame you") reinforce the sense that this is as much self-addressed communiqué as empathic tribute delivered into the maw of eternity.

The scene, then, is set: freedom, loneliness, (gender) war, insider versus outsider, introspection meets fame; these concerns wrap themselves like the kudzu vines of Marshall's southern origins around most of the 14 songs. There is an imploring quality on You Are Free — "everybody, come together/ free," "don't you want to be free?," "don't kill it, it's free," "we can all be free" — that feels like bewilderment, exasperation: "Why can't we see our fortunacy?," "Why you keep on runnin'?" This reaches its apotheosis in the beseeching "Maybe Not," a simple-enough piano-driven dirge made achingly substantial by Marshall's plaintive, haphazard harmonies — the closest we'll get to a call to arms.

Impersonal, perhaps, but 1998's singularly beautiful Moon Pix and 1996's What Would the Community Think? established a reluctant emotional barometer for those who heard Marshall's idiosyncratic dovesong as a touchpoint for all the trauma and hurt turning on the millennial fulcrum. You Are Free is the next step, then, facing the out there as well as the in here. It's messy, confused, contradictory, brash, subdued, courageous, terrified — a 21st-century record. It's survivor, not victim. And it's not perfect. Two or three too many songs dilute the impact of the album, dragging it from the lofty heights of masterwork to a level of mere disturbed brilliance — like an extraneous appendage on an already complete sculpture.

So, where is this "disturbed brilliance"? Essentially an if-you-love-someone-let-them-go break-up song, "Good Woman" drags its four distorted chords through a hopeless night. Marshall's resigned good-heartedness struggles in the wake of a played-out love affair. All the loneliness and doomed complexity of male/female relationships gathers in this almost unbearably melancholy song. Ragged guitar, a haunted violin (Dirty Three's Warren Ellis), and a shell-shocked backing "choir" (a restrained Eddie Vedder and two young girls identified simply as Maggie and Emma), suggest and echo the cumulative ripple effect on friendships such implosions often have. Countless country songs have famously aspired to this kind of slow-motion majestic train wreck, and many have fallen short. That Marshall achieves it with such apparent economy is astonishing.

Marshall's palette may not have expanded much (guitar and piano dominate once more, with spare additions of strings and occasional drums courtesy of Dave Grohl), but her application techniques have acquired greater variety and depth. Building on the "Paul Revere" drum loops of "American Flag" and the more complex rhythmic textures of "Cross Bones Style" (both from Moon Pix), songs like "He War", "Shaking Paper" and "Speak For Me" vary the tempo, break up what might otherwise have become monotony, and provide evidence that Marshall is not content to occupy just one narrow musical niche. She confirms her eclectic nature, too, (already established on The Covers Record) subjecting Michael Hurley's lonely-sounding "Werewolf" to a Euro gothic folk revision. "Keep On Runnin'", the other cover song here, is John Lee Hooker's "Crawling Black Spider" filtered through a feminine lens, literally echoing like a wounded threat in some unfurnished room.

But the album does have its missteps, blind alleys and jarring moments: "Shaking Paper" is inconsequential, going nowhere, weakly mirroring the anti-climax of the previous "He War" without any of that song's spirit (despite Grohl's urgent drums), and "Names" — harrowingly authentic as it feels, in terms of its roll call of damaged children — doesn't possess the musical dexterity to match. Without the inclusion of these, and possibly one or two others, the impact of the final song would be even greater. As it is, "Evolution" distills all the album's themes, wrapping weary piano and (Marshall's feathery and Vedder's near spoken) wraithlike vocals around a becalmed ship flapping at the sails, urging some kind of forward motion ("better make your mind up quick"). This closing song — and thus the album — leaves the word "better" repeating in our ears long after the piano notes have died away. The overall sense is one of increasingly desperate encouragement, a painful awareness that this moment now (now!) is pivotal, that to look outward requires introspection, that to move forward we need to first absorb the lessons of our past. And by doing so, perhaps even become free.

— David Antrobus (digitalis@shaw.ca)