Cat Power drowned out the bells and whistles of Paradise Rock Club with transparency, humility, and self-expression during their last show before their tour in Europe.
Charlyn Marie “Chan” Marshall egressed the backstage of Paradise Rock Club as Cat Power on the first Monday of May, packing a sly, humorous, and mysterious punch. Those who made it out on the rainy evening witnessed a kaleidoscopic performance, where the music dramatized the change in season as Cat Power invited us into the depths of her mind.
Her presentation of self, emotion, and music, were at once minimalist and mystifying. Cat Power set about the stage dryly and humbly, holding a cup of hot tea and swaying in a long black dress as she performed “Good Woman” in the darkness. To my surprise, the expected spotlight overture never came, and she remained in the shadows for the duration of the evening.
In her own subtle way, Cat Power succeeded in associating that darkness with mindfulness instead of fear. The blackened canvas over which she swirled her colorful voice made each song distinguishable not by the visual accompaniment, but by the sensation of sound.
Untangling the networks of her musical roots is almost as dizzying as interpreting her cryptic messaging and performance. Clear elements of folk, rock, blues, and punk shine through in her work, and her voice feels familiar, like a circadian rhythm. With that said, the cryptic delivery of her emotion-filled songwriting resists true stylistic classification.
It was clear as she sang “Bad Religion,” with its sparse yet powerful drumming and patient spaces, that Cat Power speaks to and for herself, to an extent that almost forces her audience to exist in their own discomforts while she is playing.
Sobbing to a sad song, as dolesome as it may be, often satisfies that deep craving we have to feel, and Cat Power performed “Metal Heart” with that exact resignation in her voice. Her cover of Jackson Browne’s “These Days” was infused with an unprecedented level of melancholy and slowness. She draped “The Moon” over the audience like a flannel on a summer evening, her tone blending coolness from the air with the comfort of intimacy.
“Manhattan” was built from the ground up with a steady, looping drum machine beat that strung the audience into a grand head bob, and demonstrated the band’s capacity to provide spacious, gripping instrumentation for Cat Power’s vocals. The drummer, Aliana Kalaba, layered hi-hat 16th notes over top, creating a motion that complemented the simple melodic lingering of Erik Paparozzi’s keyboard.
Cat Power has been writing and performing since the 1980s, when the first iteration of her band formed. Though she has experienced success and fame as a touring musician, she still treats her art personally and sensibly, as if each presentation of a song is its genesis. Many commercially successful entertainers use shows to display the breadth of their careers and artistic milestones, artfully constructing, more or less, an advertisement for themselves. Cat Power’s approach to performance seemed to oppose this norm. Her song choice and manifold stage banter were designed not to meet some generalized expectation of the audience, but to directly manifest how she felt that very evening.
It seems not to matter to Cat Power who hears her music and how, but what that feeling of releasing emotion does for her soul. She walked onto that stage under no debt or obligation to the audience, and was unafraid to create discomfort if it meant sharing honestly. The members of the band weren’t just robotically generating instrumentals for her songs. Each one seemed to be going through something personal and intense, conveying so genuinely the sentiment of being “alone together.”
Cat Power’s rejection of the spotlight was refreshing. Though it was awkward at times– the lighting, the silhouetted movements of her arms caressing the air, her miscellaneous in-between-song anecdotes– it made her presence feel all the more human and relatable. Her gorgeous, rippling voice singing out from the physical obscurity served to acknowledge and lean into even the bleakest of emotions. The spirit of Cat Power’s music reminded me of a swamp: dense with secrets, stories, and history, but accessible only to those who are willing to trudge through some ugliness.