photo from last night by Ryan Dombal

Cat Power
Terminal 5
Wednesday, February 6

Here’s an interesting question that rock and roll implicitly asks all the time but never gets answered: What happens when the things that make artists resonate are inextricably bound to the things that make them miserable human beings? And what kind of guilt do we bear given that—consciously or otherwise—we’re taking a kind of vouyeristic pleasure in watching those struggles happen (a la Amy Winehouse)? In other words: How does one be an artist and a person? On this point, I can’t help but sympathize with Cat Power’s position.

For years, Chan Marshall has been spinning a career out of the tension between her autobiographical identity and her constructed persona. At its best, her music is a site where all the opposing forces those dual-indentities imply—confession vs. concealment, self-loathing vs. tyrannical self-assertion, individual freedom vs. human connection—are always at play. Cat Power knows her rock and roll, and there’s nothing terribly new about all this. In fact, it’s probably one of music’s oldest traditions. What’s rare, really, is how clearly those tensions have made her the performer that she is. Even as she sings in that languid, melancholy whisper, her body tends to fidget around nervously—kicking, galloping, wringing her hands, physically acting out her lyrics. In one moment she could take an audience by the neck, and in the next she’d seem like she wanted to go crawl into a hole.. And for all the tantrums and meltdowns, you knew, instinctually, that for one facet of that personality to win out over the other would be for musical identity to collapse; that ultimately her art was the product of those opposing electrical charges. With The Greatest, she found a crack squad of Motown Veterans who could exploit that tension musically while carefully couching the idiosyncrasies of her voice. It was a good match. She could soften their assured strut with a bit of pathos; and, in turn, they could imbue her vulnerability with the type of rough swagger that was probably always lurking beneath it. And somewhere during the process, she got healthy.

photo from CrackersUnited.com

Interpol/Cat Power/Liars
Madison Square Garden
September 14
By Ben Westhoff

At the Garden on Friday night, Interpol kicked everybody’s asses, playing every song everyone wanted to hear (even "NYC"!).