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

The woman known as Cat Power has been known throughout her brilliant, if not occasionally checkered career for inadvertently contradicting her stage name.

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