Cat Power - Covers
At Latitude in 2019, Cat Power thanked her audience with the words, “It's been an honour to see you and exchange energy and emotions”. 'Covers' is Powers' third album of songs written and first performed by other acts, and two of these – Lana del Ray's 'White Mustang' and Frank Ocean's 'Bad Religion', featured in that Latitude set two and a half years ago. I remember it because Cat Power performs super-powerful versions of the originals - she doesn't so much as cover them as totally deconstruct and rebuild them, and those two songs were exactly that, an extraordinary exchange of energy and emotion in response to another artist's work.
Each and every track on 'Covers' is a personal response to a strong memory, be it listening with her grandmother to Billie Holiday singing 'I'll Be Seeing You'; discovering a cassette tape as a teenager featuring Kitty Wells performing 'It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels', or putting her last dollar into a jukebox in her twenties to listen to The Replacements' 'Here Comes a Regular'.
And her choice of material can be obscure as well as eclectic – how many of us are familiar with the work of Dead Man's Bones? Well, if you are a fan of Ryan Gosling you might be – it was a band he formed with Zach Shields in 2007, and spawned one album two years later. And yet, in her hands, 'Pa Pa Power' becomes one of the standout tracks on 'Covers'.
Listen to her versions of 'These Days' (from 1967's The Velvet Underground and Nico), 'The Endless Sea' (from Iggy Pop's 'New Values' in 1979), or 'I Had a Dream Joe' (Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, 'Henry's Dream', 1992), and be transported on a generous guided tour of her landmark musical memories.
As Mr Spock from Star Trek might well have concluded, “It's a covers album, Jim, but not as we know it”.
Utterly brilliant.
10/10
