Marvellous voice, overzealous band
The Roundhouse, London NW1 Cat Power
Time was, you’d be impressed at a Cat Power gig if you saw Cat Power actually manage to perform. The musician (real name Chan Marshall) was often late and usually sauced; she’d ramble and wander about, starting songs and stopping again. Sometimes she’d notice, and tell the audience to sue her if they liked.
More than a decade after sobering up, Marshall is still making her signature strain of downbeat folksy rock, but she’s quit Matador Records for Domino, and has thrown out the synths and sampled beats from her last album with the former,
Sun (2012). She’s now touring her new record, Wanderer, and to judge by Tuesday night’s performance at the Roundhouse, in north London, she’s feeling much happier.
The structure of her songs (slow, hypnotic) and the beauty of her voice (rich, elastic) have come back to the fore. Backed by a three-piece band, she swung her gentle way through the bluesy Robbin Hood and the forlorn (and obliquely anti-trump) In Your
Face. Buoyed by her own sharpness and a typically devoted crowd – swishing hands and triumphant shimmies are signs of a contented Marshall – she even built to a snarl in the weary but defiant Woman.
The other half of Marshall’s world is cover songs – Wanderer, for example, features a superb version of Rihanna’s Stay. When writing, she likes different voices to mix under the surface of her own, and at the Roundhouse her segues between her and others’ material felt like joyful little skits on how musical influence works for her.
Those pairings were on point, whether in rhythm – Nick Cave’s Into My Arms gathered pace and flowered into Marshall’s Dark End of the Street
– or lyrics: Nico’s These Days (“These days I seem to think a lot / About the things that I forgot to do”) flipped into Marshall’s Dylan tribute Song to Bobby (“I’ve always wanted to tell you/ But I never had the chance to say”).
But the Cat Power magic is delicate: her songs roll along, bearing up a voice that flows across them. It was a shame that Marshall’s band kept bursting past her, full of volume and energy, trampling on that subtlety. Some songs – such as Manhattan, a sprightlier treat from Sun – wanted them there, but plenty more needed to be left alone, to hang raw in the air.
With Wanderer, Marshall has stripped her songwriting back to its best. Her voice is still a marvel, but her team could do with retreating and letting it soar.