Golden Boots is a Tucson band which is pretty great, one of those bands where one person writes straight Beatles-y songs and the other writes things that are fairly out there. These kinds of bands always have the risk of splintering, when the pop songster wants to sell out and the weirdo clings to artistic integrity. As a band they succeed precisely in combination, and it’s imperative that they maintain respect for each other’s work. Sometimes the pop songs are just too good, or the freakonomics are too complex, and it’s like a centrifugal force whipping them apart - nothing can hold that together for long, and you know when that time comes. I suspect these guys are not heading to that point. They belong together; certainly now they succeed in combination beyond what they would apart.
My wife talked about juxtaposition - making a scene, in effect, where there is otherwise no content. By placing a cup next to a flashlight, for example, and photographing it, you make people contemplate each in the other’s frame of reference. The content is in the juxtaposition. I think it’s unfair to say that Golden Boots is only relying on juxtaposition, but it did help them to get my attention.
Cat Power, on the other hand, we agreed had no juxtaposition. Every song was in roughly the same tenor with roughly the same approach. Every song succeeded in itself, from its own integral virtues, rather than by surprising.
Here’s the thing. Chan Marshall originally appealed to me as a writer. The songs on Moon Pix are extraordinary. Her singing is great, of course, but the songs are the real draw. I see now that she is not actually a writer, but a performer.
A writer has to feel something and simultaneously think something - to remain separate from while engaged in the subject. The so-called stream-of-consciousness writings of Jack Kerouac are fun to know about but terribly boring to read. Performers, on the other hand, precisely can not be objective. They can’t be embarassed about what they were feeling at the time they wrote the song. A singer can’t think about whether the vocal is loud enough in the monitors or whether she is playing the guitar well. She has to purely express core humanity.
If Marshall is a performer, why is Moon Pix so great? Maybe because the songs were specifically written from a performance mindset. As the legend goes, she woke up from a nightmare and wrote most of the album in one stream of frightened consciousness.
So what does that mean for a Cat Power show? It means that when she sticks to expressing what she feels, she succeeds, and that’s precisely what she is doing now. She’s deep in it, soul singing, climbing out of the murk, to the extent that every song she performed was in the same vein. Even her own songs, like “I Don’t Blame You” and “Metal Heart”, are reworked into dark gospel numbers. She’s Mick Jagger in jail, she’s Nina Simone without the glee.
By the way, is it just Chan Marshall and Bill Callahan, or is there a general trend of 90’s indie bands going gospel/soul? I guess Iron & Wine came out with a 70’s rock album, so maybe the trend is generally towards our old friend authenticity.
1 year ago
