Cat Power – Covers (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 43:21 minutes | 757 MB | Genre: Indie Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Domino Recording Co

There’s nothing in the world like a Cat Power cover version. The artist also known as Chan Marshall made herself known as one of the 21st century’s finest interpreters of other artists’ material – her re-imaginings as emotionally devastating as they are decidedly dreamlike – at the very beginning of the millennium.

On 2000’s ‘The Covers Record’, she found new elegance in trad-rock and butch blues – from the Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ to The Velvet Underground’s ‘I Found A Reason’ – before doubling down on 2008’s ‘Jukebox’, which made woozy inroads into country and folk with torchy and twinkling takes on classics by Hank Williams, Joni Mitchell and country blues legend Jessie Mae Hemphill.

Initially an answer to a time in Marshall’s life when she felt more at ease singing other people’s songs than her own, her cover versions now possess a strength all of their own, with the self-produced ‘Covers’ setting itself apart from its predecessors by veering into the modern mainstream. Here material by Frank Ocean (‘Bad Religion’) and Lana Del Rey (‘White Mustang’) appears alongside the more long-established likes of Nick Cave (‘I Had A Dream, Joe’), Jackson Browne (‘These Days’) and The Pogues (‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’). Marshall has carefully selected each song to reflect a personal memory.

A tender, sparse take on Billie Holiday’s ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’ was a favourite of her grandmother’s and a mournful, piano-led, rendering of The Replacements’ ‘Here Comes a Regular’ reminds Marshall of spending her final dollar to play the song on a New York City jukebox. Sadness is an art, and here Cat Power does it exceptionally well.
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