Jukebox (Matador)

The way things are shaping up, when Cat Power is inducted into the alterna-chick wing of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 20 years from now, pundits will divide her career into two distinct halves. In the beginning, there was the emotionally unstable wreck who produced off-kilter classics like Moon Pix, You Are Free, and What Would the Community Think. For her first 10 years, whether she meant to or not, Cat Power positioned herself as a captivatingly fucked-up cult hero for the depressed and disenfranchised.

All that changed in 2006 with the release of the slickly produced, swinging, and soulful The Greatest. Suddenly the woman also known as Chan Marshall seemed so confident it was like she’d been shipped off and radically reprogrammed. What marks this second phase of Cat Power’s career is that she is no longer a haunted mess. That would be forgivable if she didn’t suddenly sound like a careerist.

Jukebox is Marshall’s second collection of covers, but it’s radically different from 2000’s The Covers Record. During her lost years, Cat Power didn’t have to do much but plaintively sing, her smoky marvel of a voice transforming classic-rock staples like “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” into desperate antiballads. On Jukebox, she sounds strangely affected, every line of the Sinatra standard “New York” having enough unnecessary vocal tics to make Mariah Carey flinch. And so it goes, through a skeletal take on James Brown’s “Lost Someone”, a guitar-frazzled reading of Bob Dylan’s “I Believe in You”, and a sacrilegious reworking of the Moon Pix track “Metal Heart”. Marshall seems like she’s consciously trying to give her newfound fans what she thinks they want from her. Those who didn’t get onboard until The Greatest will no doubt thrill to Jukebox’s porno-funk mounting of Joni Mitchell’s “Blue”. For the rest of us, we can only hope that Cat Power isn’t quite as together as she seems.