cat power, sun

i'm sure there's some discussion of it on a cat power thread from 2004 or whatever but anyway, this is a record

it also starts off texturally far closer to her early work than anything since before the covers record. i'm not sure how i feel about it once the drums come in.

it sounds a little bit like cocorosie now. remember cocorosie?

the drum machine stuff on this is so terrible sounding and ill-conceived

I don't hate it, but I'm not wowed either. I just listened to Myra Lee last night and was amazed how great that album still sounds to me. I love it because it has so few parts and they are all clean (few effects). The new album sounds like every part has 2 or 3 effects slopped on it.

every time i put this on to give it another chance i notice something else wrong with it. the drum sounds are awful as al says. the clumsy rhythms on the opener. the awful autotune bit. the endless list of countries like she's an airline advert, compounded by pronouncing it "mejico" and "grande bretagne" for no reason.

and this is an album i thought i liked at first.

but i've never REALLY loved cat power i guess, she has several excellent songs and a couple of albums i'll rep for but i've always felt she's too limited to be all that interesting an artist

i want the guitar back and her smoky voice and the trance and the space. and not keyboard songs full of electronic glue without tunes which go nowhere without ever ending. i don't have time for 11 minutes of nothin but time.

I wanted to like this direction. I much prefer it in theory to the bar band tedium of the past few records. The mix on the first track is one of the worst mixed tracks I've heard in years.
Did she co-write 3-6-9 w. Lana Del Ray?

you drink wine you feel fine monkey on your back u feel alright

reiterating that i love the really long track on this

oh that one's a trainwreck

Cat Power is one of the only bands where i kinda decided after loving the early records that i just couldn't deal w/ the new stuff and was going cold turkey, kinda bums me out that that was ruined by a promo copy of You Are Free falling into my lap a couple years ago and now Spotify making it too easy to give the new one a listen.

i like it.

I don't mind this - enjoy some of the textural stuff, but not thrilled with the production. I understand she produced this by herself w/pro tools and it kind of shows - lots of kitchen sink mixes, not enough restraint in layering parts, etc.

I hate that super long track, but I kind of love that I hate it, if that makes sense. Almost every Cat Power record has something on it that's gaudy or misguided or somehow embarrassing; having to confront that is a big part of the experience for me

I understand why she's trying a 'new' kind of sound but it really doesn't work for her. She's mostly introverted and it has a way of showing in her music and her live shows.

Her music sounds much better when she records in a comfortable environment. She's at her best when she's recording home with her guitars on a four-track. I've always imagined she feels incredibly awkward in a studio with other people. Like she's sort of lazy and likes to go slowly and do different, apparently insignificant changes every take and in a studio she feels rushed and like she's wasting money and others people's time.

I might be assuming too much but that's the sort of persona she gives to me.

So anyways, now, she decides to do the 'studio' things other people do better on her own because she doesn't really like the studio and she prefers to have control but she's not really that experienced or particularly good at it. She does sound more comfortable, though. I'm not thrilled by the album but I think she's on the right path. If it doesn't take her 4 years to release new stuff I'd find it more interesting to hear where she goes from here.

pretty sure this album is mostly home recorded and pretty much all the early records were done in studios

super long track is ok but it is just Heroes drawn out to 9 minutes, I don't think I've made it through the whole thing yet

reiterating that i love the really long track on this

― J0rdan S., Tuesday, September 11, 2012 12:00 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

total goon rock obv

Xxpost: are they? Everything before moon pix sounds lo-fi enough to fool me. Even some of the songs on moon pix sound recorded at home. I'm aware she did this one at home but she had always worked with more erm... Analogue mediums. Maybe it got lost in there but I'm happy for her going back to a more independent approach to her recording process. It's the final result which fails to excite me.

That said Manhattan is quite good.

cherokee is really dope

i love this album. been playing it nonstop all week

pretty sure this album is mostly home recorded and pretty much all the early records were done in studios

does she talk about the recording process anywhere?

This album is a real bummer, she's really lost her way....it's sad because I feel like shes trying to be really ”creative” in her arrangements which just feel cluttered & ineffective, like sam's choice feist, when a record like you are free just blew my mind in terms of how distinctive and inventive and great her arrangements were, just using a few elements but using them so perfectly

the Spin interview covers the recording process pretty extensively

thx, i'll check it out

lol @ "sam's choice feist"

i found this interview w/ her, but no recording info. maybe it's longer in the magazine? http://www.spin.com/articles/cat-power-raw-power?page=0

i think this album is the best thing from her i've heard - better than moon pix, you are free and the greatest. i don't really know the covers or really early albums

that's what i was talking about, i dunno if you're looking for more detail or different aspects of it than this though:

Sun isn't intended to be a repudiation of that, but she produced the album and played the sundry electronic synths and samplers herself on all but a few bits, then pieced together the songs with Pro Tools, all things she'd never done before. ("I have no fuckin' idea what that shit was called or what it does, but as long as it's plugged in, I can use it," she says. "Anyone can bang on a piano or hit a drum. I never fucking had a lesson. I don't know how to play like people who know how to play. A monkey could do it.")

...

Which is not to say that Sun was an easy record to make, or lacked drama. She played an early demo for a trusted confidant — "I can't say whom, I'll hurt someone's feelings" — whose reaction was just withering enough to crush her momentum. "I've never played songs like that for anyone before, and he thought the songs were too slow. I was really devastated and didn't do anything else for, like, eight months."

But from that tailspin came a resolve to do things differently. She booked studio time in Los Angeles so she could write in earnest, rather than hope her tape recorder at home had batteries whenever the muse struck. A turning point came when she heard the Beastie Boys' Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, and she arranged to meet Philippe Zdar, who mixed that record, in Paris to play him the new demos.

"The songs sounded pretty much the way they do now," says Zdar, who considered Marshall's lack of familiarity with the tools of production to be an asset as he helped her piece the bits together into songs over nine months in France. "There was a naïveté, but also a genuineness. She's true. She doesn't try to seduce you."

although i guess i overstated how much the album was recorded at home upthread

She never really grabbed my attention 'til Jukebox; my two cents about Sun, from an older thread:
I'm initially infatuated w Cat Power's Sun. Much more vigorous than expected, a post-break-up album as one-woman synth-pop combo (thought she had Jim White back on the drums, but it's her, damn). Most tracks seem similiar, but with good detail in arrangements sustaining alertness, and the last three tracks go in diff directions, zig-zag-zack, I guess Yaz might be a precedent, but she's never gonna be a big rich belter, just veering and glancing, no longer the waif though Have since read that Jim White is on at least one track.