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Cat Power Jukebox

Review by Dominic Blaazer

To use a tuck-shop analogy, if Tom Jones’s covers album was a slab of rocky road, full of chemical colours and sickly sugar, then Cat Power’s Jukebox is a hand-made muesli slice: reminiscent of good things long-gone and created with love and care.

That said, I don’t actually believe there should be a genre called “covers albums” because that can imply the work is somehow not as valid as an originals album (they’re always somebody’s originals). Especially not when they’re as good as this one.

The choice of material is wide-ranging in both its original style and chronology, taking in songs by performers as diverse as Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday, James Brown and Bob Dylan. However, Jukebox slips away from the pack by presenting a new Cat Power song as well as a self-cover of one of her earlier tracks. (That’s a move I applaud; it makes me sad when I get the feeling an Artiste has little interest in their own back-catalogue.)

So, this collection of songs is not only chosen out of respect but is also magnificently performed in an understated way by a core band that amounts to an “indie supergroup”. And as with her previous LP, The Greatest, legendary sidemen like Teenie Hodges and Spooner Oldham also make fine contributions.

To my ears though, the star is not Cat’s dreamy come-hither voice or the nonchalant way she reinterprets these standards, it’s in the sound of the music, right from the opening bars of Jim White’s drum-set.

It’s real and honest in the way a Lucinda Williams record sounds, or any of Johnny Cash’s final American releases. You’ll hear the room, you’ll hear the creaks and the breaths and the fingers too, but most of all, you’ll hear the song.

Video: Outtake from recording sessions at the Hit Factory in Miami for Cat Power’s Jukebox. This song, “Dark End of the Street”, wasn’t included in the final track listing…