Cat Power wants to be free, she was singing about it nine years ago, but with her new album ‘Sun’, it is a step toward more freedom. It took her six years to release an album of original material – ‘Jukebox’ was an album of covers – but she certainly wasn’t taking the same kind of break she took at Amoeba during her signing. After the release of her 2006 Memphis-soul album ‘The Greatest’, she ended up been crippled by debt, faced bankruptcy, went through a psychotic break due to exhaustion and alcohol abuse, was hospitalized several times, and recently lived the end of her relationship with actor Giovanni Ribisi, just coinciding with the release of ‘Sun’.
However, if Chan Marshall has often written songs embracing darkness and depression, if she has sung ‘I said I hate myself and I want to die’ on ‘Hate’ featured on her previous album, there is nothing close to this on 'Sun', and the only connection you could find with ‘The Greatest’, would be the existence of Sun Studio in Memphis. The music is certainly very different, the guitars are eclipsed by heavy and propulsive synthesizers, piano, electronics, drum machines, even auto tune, driving dance beats and her smoky voice arranged in many layers, harmonizing with itself a million times.
Freedom and Lady Liberty run throughout the eleven songs, despite all the troubles in her personal life, this is a triumphant rebirth, which, far from focusing on her own depression, opens up to the whole world with a rare generosity.
‘Cherokee’ has visions of the sun at zenith with an eagle’s fierce scream at the top of Chan's harmonies, while she almost makes ‘burry me’ rhyme with ‘marry me’. With this Native American theme, she embraces the whole natural world as a new religion ‘the wind the moon the Earth the sky’, and, throughout the album, there is no distinction between the landscape of her mind and that of nature, her personal torments and those of the whole world. Just like in ‘Ruin’, where she travels over the entire world with this infectious circular rhythm, while singing compassionate lines, ‘bitchin complaining and some people ain’t got shit to eat’.
If ‘Sun’ is the central theme of the album, the title song (which despite its ‘here comes the sun’ line has little to do with the Harrison’s song) drowns you in synths, and strikes you down as if the star’s hottest rays were received like a new revelation.
There are still direct allusions to addiction and depression, ‘3,6,9 / You drink wine / Monkey on your back / You feel just fine’, are sung in '3, 6, 9' with almost hip hop beats from a child song, but it doesn’t last long, and soon she is affirming again her independence, or rather every human being’s right to independence, in ‘Human Being’. She hypnotically repeats ‘You gotta right’, and 'You gotta right to scream when they don't want you to speak', singing about human rights in all directions with a heartfelt conviction over a wonderful and pulsating sound, as if she was giving a melancholic echo to the Clash’s ‘Know Your Rights’.
When the sun is not present, the moon takes over, like in ‘Manhattan’, which sounds like a nocturnal love ballad with simple and lonely piano chords in the middle of all these crushing-sun songs, whereas ‘Silent Machine’ has a bluesy undertone which reminds me some tunes off Beck’s ‘Modern Guilt’.
But it is the ascending ‘Nothin But Time’ which is the most life-affirming declaration she has ever written. ‘I know this life seems never ending’, she sings paralleling the length of the track, which lasts almost 11 minutes. The music echoes David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’, and at the end of the song, we even get Iggy Pop doing his most comforting baritone in a short duet. ‘You wanna live/you wanna be somebody’, she sings in a true optimistic manner, ‘You want to reach the end/and want to live/my way of living’, addressing to herself as a child, and to the rest of the world, while Iggy adds ‘It’s up to you/to be a superhero/it’s up to you/to be like nobody’. And then, everything seems possible.
The album closes with the more aggressive and faster ‘Peace & Love’, which has even a direct Black Flag reference. If at first I thought the previous anthemic song with Iggy was better for an album closer, this last one finally wins since it closes ‘Sun’ on a high, with the line ‘I may be a lover but I‘m in it to win’.
The album is intriguing and luminous, the vocals still carry sorrow and ache, but Chan Marshall confidently explores sonic layers she hadn’t before, and the album becomes a joyous adventure turned outwards instead of inwards while reclaiming a new liberty. ‘Here is the day/ We are free, you and me, and we can finally run’, she sings in ‘Sun’ the title song. She invites everyone in a generous élan and it is hard to resist.