It can take a keen set of ears to tell when Chan Marshall is singing someone else’s tune. Take her rendition of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which opens 2000’s The Covers Record. Her voice dragging over spindly guitar, she sounds like a broken bird in a burned-out nest. Where the Stones’ swaggering anthem was a hot-blooded rush, Marshall’s version is hushed and dolorous, a wilted lily in an airless mausoleum. It’s not just a question of mood: She excises the song’s entire chorus, leaving only vignettes that feel like disconnected snapshots of a deep and unrelenting depression. Where the Stones’ song revels in a surfeit of emotion, Cat Power’s anhedonic dirge is a lament for the very impossibility of feeling anything at all.
To render a song so unrecognizable can appear irreverent, but Marshall has never come off as ironic or trolling. Even her most radical reinterpretations feel tender, searching, and, above all, thoughtful. And there are many: In addition to what are now three collections of cover songs, with the arrival of her latest album, Covers, most of her releases contain at least one song made famous by another singer. Her choices can be canonical or idiosyncratic: She’s tackled Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan, and Billie Holiday, but also Liza Minelli, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Ca$h Money rappers Hot Boys. Long before indie rock’s cloistered scene had given way to a more diverse and dynamic landscape, Marshall reminded her listeners that life didn’t begin with the Velvet Underground (even though she covered them too). The widest ranging of any of her covers collections yet, Covers pushes beyond the habitual melancholy that has marked much of her work. In bold colors and vivid relief, it illustrates her talent for radical reinvention.
Her choices are audacious right from the opening track: “Bad Religion,” a total teardown of Frank Ocean’s 2012 single about nursing emotional wounds. In place of the original’s gospel organs and ’60s soul strings, Marshall swaps in piano backed by a subtle but muscular rock rhythm section. She not only changes the song’s key; she writes new chords and even a new melody. And while some of her lyrical edits might seem minor on the page—“Praise the Lord/Hallelujah, little girl” in place of “Allahu akbar”—her delivery brings these lines to the forefront, drawing out “Lord” into four agonized syllables that feel like a physical bloodletting. The most striking line of all is her own addition: “All just stuck in the mud/Praying to the invisible above,” an act of supplication that teases out the song’s implicit theme of faith and illuminates it like a cross up on the wall.
Rarely content with merely rearranging the decor of a given song, Marshall seems happier tearing up floorboards and pulling down drywall, as though she were intent upon revealing structures that were there all along, just hidden from view. On “Unhate,” she covers herself, translating the skeletal blues of The Greatest’s “Hate” into a smoldering, psychedelic whorl of Rhodes and multi-tracked vocals. To revisit a song where the key line is “I hate myself and I want to die” is no small thing; here, it feels like a statement of defiance, as though only by saying the words could she rob them of their power. Where the original is fragile and dejected, this song pulses with life. It’s striking, in fact, how forceful so many of the songs are. She turns the motorik chug of Iggy Pop’s “The Endless Sea” into an eerie electric blues, woozy but hi-def, that takes additional cues from the Stooges’ “Dirt”; she remakes the rolling psychobilly of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ “I Had a Dream Joe” into a seething, churning drone that feels cut from Swans’ ritualistic cloth.
Of course, this being Cat Power, there’s plenty of material that is simple and bittersweet, like a downy pump-organ update of the Pogues’ “A Pair of Brown Eyes” or a starkly sentimental rendition of “These Days,” a Jackson Browne song first made famous by Nico. Marshall’s fingerpicked version of the latter is one of the album’s most faithful tributes; ironically, that makes it one of Covers’ riskier moves, given how many times the soft-rock standard has been interpreted by other singers. But Marshall’s weary tone is such a lovely fit for its downcast air, it might as well have been written expressly for her. Her voice has never sounded better than it does on Covers; her greatest interpretive talent might be her ability to slip between the lines of the stave and capture shades of emotion so subtle that they defy naming. Consider “I’ll Be Seeing You,” a love song popularized in the 1940s. Billie Holiday’s version is wistfully but gracefully resigned, a fond farewell to a bygone love. But Cat Power’s husky enunciation and mournful blue notes make it sound less like a ballad than an obituary. It’s devastating.
One of the album’s best tracks is also its most unexpected. The song “Pa Pa Power” is by Dead Man’s Bones, a Halloween-themed project from 2009 featuring actor Ryan Gosling and a children’s choir founded by Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea. Their song, if it’s about anything, might be about deceitful robots. (“We won’t destroy you,” promises the chipper chorus, but the verses tell another tale: “Burn the street, burn the cars… Broken glass, broken hearts.”) The tone is quirky and low-stakes, faintly ironic—imagine Man or Astro-Man? as sung by the Langley Schools Music Project, perhaps—and largely forgettable. But in Marshall’s hands, it becomes something else entirely. Though she’s barely changed the words, it sounds like she’s singing about revolution, turning Gosling’s band’s flat affect into a plea of anguish: “Burn the streets, burn the cars/Power/Broken glass, but what about our broken hearts?” Lingering on every broken syllable, the grain of her voice gone smooth, she sounds bone tired, as though worn down by the past few years of social upheaval and daunted by the long, uphill climb to come. Again, her voice does the heavy lifting, every sigh and pause and halting melisma expressing as much as, or more than, any of her couplets. When I hear her singing “Pa Pa Power,” I can’t help but wonder: What did she hear in Dead Man’s Bones’ song in order to turn it into this? In moments like these, the unusual nature of her approach reveals itself. On Covers, we don’t just hear Marshall singing to us; we hear her listening to the world.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.
