CatPower
Sun

Like it or not, in almost twenty years of career, Chan Marshall has always put her (volatile) personality in the foreground, over audience expectations and fashionable atrocities. It might even be the case that she’s a bit out of her mind, as there are plenty of testimonies to that effect: hours of lonely guitar strumming in the woods, concerts made up of songs started and abruptly interrupted, (im)possible interviews, not to mention the nervous breakdowns and alcohol excesses. She's truly left nothing out, but for the writer - considering the excellent music produced - that's just fine.

"Sun" (a work with a very troubled genesis: the first recordings are from 2007...) is at first listen the "electronic shift" album, which then (after overcoming the initial necessary bewilderment) isn’t as radical as it seems. Certainly, with Philippe Zdar (half of Cassius) in production, electronic drums and synths play an important role. But the tones are in line with the chiaroscuro of the last original material album (that "The Greatest" which confirmed our artist’s artistic maturity); the simple piano chords - albeit coated by electro modernist arrangements - are still there; and above all there’s still "that" voice, capable of conveying emotions like few others.

It happens that within the album (and often in the same song), elements of continuity and rupture mix with each other: the title track (whose melody is literally immersed in a bath of electronics) is perhaps the most emblematic moment of the new course; but already the single "Ruin" combines the frantic cadence of the piano with dance-like temptations, and the same happens in the nursery rhyme "3,6,9" whose rather conventional start is overturned by the abundant use of Auto-Tune on the final choirs (and we're not that far from r'n'b territories). Elsewhere, there’s a sure bet with dark meditations ("Human Being") updated to the minimal use of electronics ("Manhattan"). We could have done without the almost 11 minutes of "Nothing But Time" (with a guest appearance by Iggy Pop near the end) or a rather dispensable episode like "Silent Machine", but Chan Marshall’s stylistic signature is encapsulated here: the ease with which she has ventured into musically foreign territories to her background reveals the most personal and courageous work of her career. Some episodes might even bore, but they will hardly sound false.

"If I die before my time, bury me upside down,” sings Chan Marshall in the chorus of "Cherokee" (a feverish descent into hell whose funereal mood is partially hidden by the lively arrangement). The hope is that she continues to communicate, perhaps to exorcise - through music - the fears and disappointments that trouble her existence.