Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 16/01/06
Label: Matador

To record her seventh album, Chan Marshall returned to the scene of her second, forgotten home of Southern Soul, Memphis. Here she recruited the Al Green players that built the Hi Records sound of the '70s. Amongst them, Mabon "Teenie" Hodges, the guitarist who co-wrote Green classics like "Love And Happiness" and "Take Me To The River". They imbue Marshall's pathos-laden music with the elegant sadness of a culture left out to rust.

Few bands could play with the delicacy required by this most reticent of frontwomen, allowing her to shine as she does in many places throughout these ambiguous tales of love and defeat. Nothing so brash and obvious as a chorus finds its way into these cracked structures. The closest the record comes to a signature song, "Willie", sits centre stage at six minutes, and yet is muttered and slurred so elegantly it takes and effort of will to penetrate the sounds and textures of the vocal to discover words.

Neither Cat Power, nor the other characters she adopts here really want to be heard. She sings like an emotionally illiterate young offender, all unintelligible shuffling, ashamed to admit that she just wants to be loved. Similar characters inhabit both the title track and "Lived In Bars", could-a-beens facing up to a world in which they have to live with their limitations.

The latter is boozy enough to have been lifted from the Tom Waits songbook circa "Heart Of Saturday Night", the former could have been written by a Sufjan Stevens deserted by his God. "Willie" reeks of classic era soul, neglected and fading away, making a defiant claim but destined to go unheard in all its ghostly beauty. "Love & Communication" plugs in a little distortion to accompany the bitter pill that there's always something better than where we're at.

If these songs catch a magical intangible by pairing Marshall's naked vocal with a ghost of Memphis passion, others fail to turn the same trick. "Living Proof" and "After It All" sound like a New York boho backed by soulless and proficient session musicians. "Hate" and "Where Is My Love", tacked on without any Hi Records magic, a concession for those for whom "The Greatest" won't be quite bleak enough.

In its flickering beauty though, there is plenty to cast a light in the smallest hours.

    by James Poletti