wait until dark

The sound was sultry and portentous, a turbulent indigo rendered in fitful hypnotic tones. The singer swings, she waltzes around slow and restlessly, her unsure steps veiled by a thin wild melancholy sound and the heated intimacy of her powerful, unpolished croon. Her pirate smile, the familiar ache in her voice singing songs of silken elegance that act as both sympathetic magic and bewitching method acting, a portrayal of someone raised on robbery and trying to outrun the wolves of memories from long ago, far away.

This being a Cat Power performance, you know you’re well in for some ragged song interpretation, either of her own tunes or the cover versions that fill up her last two records Jukebox and Dark End of the Street (both 2008) – any expectation otherwise just about went up in smoke as Chan Marshall opened by leading her band through a rambling, mercurial “House of the Rising Sun”. A souped-up “Silver Stallion” and a rather shambolic “Lived In Bars” tipped towards the Southern soul of her well-received 2006 record The Greatest, while the moodier and less immediate material (notably a haunting rendition of Joni Mitchell’s “Blue”) had the spook.

The earthy charisma about Marshall’s not entirely comfortable stage demeanor is kinda endearing to be able to witness in real time. As the band plowed ahead adeptly on the classic country heartbreak “She’s Got You”, there was a split moment when her voice cracks, her mouth sets slightly out of joint for a second, and time briefly slips out of mind. Another moment that you won’t imagine to be easily replicable: Marshall and her band melding the connective tissues between the jazz standard “Lilac Wine” (made famous by the late great Nina Simone) and her own “Where Is My Love” in lackadaisical chorus, and inevitably turning both songs into something unrecognizable and beautifully vulnerable. Quite breathtaking stuff.