In a week, a month, a year when I’m experiencing some great music, I didn’t realise just how much it would mean to me to realise that Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power, had broken radio silence and is preparing to hit us with a new album ‘Sun’. I’m trying my best to be objective here, but let’s be truthful. Last time I saw her, in 2008, we were so keen that we had ticket numbers 1, 2, 3 & 4 for a thousand capacity venue haha. It was a great, brilliant, fantastic gig, at a time when everyone who went to see Chan was more than half expecting a drunken and emotional train wreck. Read about it here if you wish or even just look at this picture which was when Chan had ignored all conventions about encores and simply played two hours straight up to Manchester’s strictly observed 11pm curfew. Even then, she just stayed on stage, music off, houselights up, waving, chatting and as you can see in the picture, finding set lists, picks or just whatever else she could to throw to the fans.
I picked up a copy of the Stoolpigeon (a UK music paper) on Sunday this week and nearly fell over to see that they have a penetrating and lengthy interview with Chan, which you can read online here. Yes, that’s her in the photo, she sort of cut her hair off when her relationship broke up at the same time she was putting the record together. Oh dear, you might think, but looking at the interview she’s got over it and not crashed like she used to in 2006.
I’ve been saving the best until last. There’s a new track, right here and ready to go:
It took until 1:03, where she drawls and slides over the word ‘city-eeh’ to realise what I’ve been missing, and being as non-partisan as I can, about 5 seconds longer than that to realise this is absolutely the best track I’ve heard since Austra‘s ‘The Beat And The Pulse’, which if you know me, is placing it pretty high. As well as the youtube, you can download a 24bit version of the same track at http://www.catpowermusic.com/ without even any of that crap about giving them them your email address. Oh man, this is news, simply NEWS…..
