Cat Power visits Montreal in support of Sun, her first album of all-original material in half a decade

From her earliest work in the mid-nineties, it’s vulnerability and aberrant emotional honesty that makes her music and especially her voice so endearing – above all, 1998’s Moon Pix, featuring the mournful “Metal Heart”, which was revisited and kicked up a notch in 2008‘s Jukebox. In the studio and in her live performance, Chan Marshall embraces imperfections as what makes a song perfect; each quirk is a sign of life, a raw but diffident expression of existence.

Her new effort and first all-original output in about six years, Sun, is no exception. Marshall indulges in some contemporary flourishes and goes more electric than ever before, a turn from her signature bare-bones, loner approach of “guitar or piano, pick one”. She’s let some less expected musical influences seep into her songwriting: found rhythms from hip-hop and R&B artists the likes of Mary J. Blige, and some haphazard synthesizer keyboard experimentation, inform a novel articulation of her soulful sound that often verges on troubled folk à la Bob Dylan.

Now the indie singer-cum-rock ‘n roll fashion icon is 40 and coming out of a five-year relationship with actor Giovanni Ribisi (who went on to marry 29-year-old model Agyness Deyn barely a few months after the fact), but Sun is no breakup record. Written and recorded pre-split, Marshall actually scrapped the first drafts of her songs because she was told they were ‘too sad’.

What we have instead is a collection of songs that embody Cat Power’s proven strengths while at once looking forward, looking on the bright side, and looking through a magnifying glass at society’s blemishes. Thinking back on the obfuscating lyricisms of past Cat Power efforts, just imagine how radically different a Cat Power breakup album would’ve sounded.

Cat Power
October 19 | Metropolis
59, St. Catherine E.
with Willis Earl Beal and Xray Eyeballs
catpowermusic.com