Cat Power - 'Sun'

CAT POWER
Sun

Matador, 2012

• Favorites:

  "Sun," "Real Life"

• FLAVORS:

  Coppertone, Sour Diesel, Blue Raspberry Slurpee

RATING:

TRACK LIST:

• Cherokee
• Sun
• Ruin
• 3,6,9
• Always On My Own
• Real Life
• Human Being
• Manhattan
• Silent Machine
• Nothin' But Time
• Peace And Love

Finally, Cat Power gives her fans the hip-hop record we’ve been waiting for. With her incisive wit, a vastly expanded sonic palette, and a voice that sounds clearer and with more range than it ever has, Chan Marshall serves us some wisdom. If you liked the uncomfortably intimate Marshall of the early Cat Power records, an angel’s voice betraying uncertainty, she’s back. If you liked Cat Power as the Certifiable Indie Rock Star of the late 1990s, who perfected a certain kind of urban folk rock and preached a fundamental ambivalence about, well, being alive—she’s here too. If you only got into Cat Power in the time since The Covers Record and The Greatest, and only know Marshall as a world-weary blueswoman, alluding always to sadness, regret and pain, decorated with flashes of faith and optimism, you’ll recognize her on the new album.

But something’s here that wasn’t there before. Maybe it’s that this is the first record Marshall produced herself, maybe it’s that she’s moved to Malibu, maybe it’s the new haircut, or her intimations that she’s smoking (what you just know has got to be the best fucking) weed. Sun has a stark, newfound emotional clarity that’s matched by its groovy experimentation. Relentlessly funky, buttressed by unexpected electronic elements, Sun is totally different from anything she’s has ever released, but her songwriting and voice are recognizable. She knows what she wants, for maybe the first time, and it’s a strange and beautiful thing. She’s got some new perspective to match her new beats. Cat Power always sang about difficult feelings, but for the first time, she’s singing that it’s okay to have them. It’ll pass, check out the sun, yo. Sun is the hard-earned reward for a long, difficult night.