Cat Power leaves behind the 'Community' boys' club

What Would the Community Think (Matador)

Indie rock is littered with knock-kneed, suburban-Chicago college boys hunched over their guitars, trying forever to rewrite the Slint and Sebadoh catalogs. Perhaps the only way to revitalize the genre is to feminize it--put a world-weary coal miner's daughter at the mic and let her rip. At least, that would seem to be Cat Power's prescription. What Would the Community Think offers up the voice of Chan Marshall--with decades of a blues-meets-C&W,"mah-man-left-me" tradition dragging gorgeously behind it--to the brittle arpeggiating, caustic sheets of guitar, and multi-rhythmic drumming that typify the Touch & Go ethos, rendering a tiring dynamic newly idiosyncratic.

The bluesy fatigue that characterizes Marshall's roadside-diner-waitress voice is often ominous, as if she were resigned to the inevitability of an oncoming threat. "Maybe if I talk to the Lord about it / I'll get some sleep / But the Lord don't give a shit about me" ("They Tell Me") is standard Freakwater sentiment. (Marshall might be Freakwater's flakier, damaged sister.) But the murmured intonation, "After this there will be no more good clean fun" ("Good Clean Fun"), sounds like an ultimatum delivered while drifting off to sleep. She even sings "Nobody does better / Baby, you're the best" to her lover and manages not to sound like a James Bond theme song, mostly because her delivery seems to change slightly with each listen, by turns mournful, seething, and drowsily blissful.

Compelling ambiguity like that embodied in "Good Clean Fun" never shows up in the work of today's sons of Slint, though the same shimmering drums and snaky, sexual interplay of guitars is certainly attempted. So is the tension of the climaxing chord progressions of "Nude as the News" and the chill created by the single, sobbing tear of feedback that cleaves the title track. But rarely are these elements so damn sexy--but darkly sexy, scary-sexy, like electric Medea. Other songs, including "King Rides By" and "They Tell Me," have more of a loping C&W feel, but they hardly spring from deep country roots--more like the Nashville-tinged sections of labelmate Liz Phair's Whip-Smart.

Thankfully, irony plays as small a part in What Would the Community Think as artifice does. Marshall's little-girl whimpers, broken sobs, and Patsy-Cline-meets-Courtney-Love shrieks aren't meant as arch commentary on a bygone tradition. Cat Power doesn't resign itself to mere cleverness, but is brave enough to vault itself over the top--much like Smog, who are lovingly saluted in a fragile, hedging, stuttering cover of "Bathysphere," which Cat Power then rewrites on their own "Water and Air." "My lover drifted down the river / Below the dark water / The devil all around," Marshall bleats, just like P.J., while cellos rub corrosively underneath the melody, murmuring like the movements of deep, black water.

"Yesterday on the street / Someone called out your name / Someone thought you were me," Marshall sings on "Water and Air," sounding drugged, subdued, blank-eyed. She could easily be singing about the plight of the indistinguishable indie band, just another face in an increasingly faceless crowd. Much of Cat Power's work is confessional, but on points of artistic individuality, Marshall, unlike most of her derivative peers, has little to confess.

--Jessica Winter