Cate Kennan - Shadows - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

2022 . Pompeii, Cate Le Bon's sixth full-length studio album and the follow up to 2019's Mercury-nominated Reward, bears a storied title summoning apocalypse, but the metaphor eclipses any 'dissection of immediacy,' says Le Bon. Sonically minimal in parts, it's lyrics jog between self-reflection and direct address. Written primarily on bass and composed entirely alone in an 'uninterrupted vacuum,' Le Bon plays every instrument (except drums and saxophones) and recorded the album largely by herself with long-term collaborator and co-producer Samur Khouja in Cardiff, Wales To leverage visionary control, Le Bon invented twisted types of discipline into her absurdist decision making. Primary goals in this project were to mimic the 'religious' sensibility in one of Tim Presley's paintings, which hung on the studio wall in Cardiff, Wales as a meditative image and was reproduced as a portrait of Le Bon for Pompeii's cover. Fist across the heart, stalwart and saintly how to make 'music that sounds like a painting?' Cate asked herself. Enter piles of Pompeii's signature synths made on favorites such as the Yamaha DX7, amongst others; basslines inspired by 1980s Japanese city pop, designed to bring joyfulness and abandonment; vocal arrangements that add memorable depth to the melodic fabric of each song; long-term collaborator Stella Mozgawa's 'jazz-thinking' percussion patched in from quarantined Australia; and Khouja's encouraging presence. Album Tracks 1. Dirt on the Bed 2. Moderation 3. French Boys 4. Pompeii 5. Harbour 6. Running Away 7. Cry Me Old Trouble 8. Remembering Me 9. Wheel

It's creation led by pure emotion, Cate Le Bon's seventh record Michelangelo Dying usurped the album she thought she was making. The product of all-consuming heartache, her feelings overrode her reluctance to write an album about love, and in the process became a kind of exorcism. What emerges is a wonderfully iridescent attempt to photograph a wound before it closes up - but which in doing so, picks at it too. Musically, there is a continuation and expansion of a sound - a machine with a heart - that has taken shape over her last two records (2019's Reward and 2022's Pompeii) as Le Bon has increasingly taken control of the playing and producing herself. As guitars and saxophones are pushed through pedals and percussion and voices are fed through filters, an iridescent, green and silky sound emerges, with flashes of the artistic singularities of David Bowie, Nico, John McGeoch and Laurie Anderson surfacing and disappearing below the waterline throughout. What we're left with is an ever-changing, continuous entity, a kind of song cycle. Each iteration reflects and progresses the last, Incheach one a shard of the same broken mirrorInch - shifting, glinting, concealing and revealing, depending on how it is turned in the light. There are ultimately, Cate asserts, InchNo revelations. No conclusions. There is no reason. There is repetition and chaos. I eventually allowed myself a vacant mind to experience it without resistance and without searching for a revelation or order to any of it.Inch An exercise in the viscerality of life, of love, of humanity for both listener and artist, Michelangelo Dying knows what it is to hold, to be held, and to be exquisitely, profoundly alone. InchThe characters are interchangeableInch concludes Cate, Inchbut at the end of it all, it's me meeting myself.Inch Album Tracks 1. Jerome 2. Love Unrehearsed 3. Mothers of Riches 4. Is I

Cat Power, the vocalist, songwriter, musician and producer Chan Marshall, returns with her new album Covers, her third album of celebrated reinterpretations of songs by classic and contemporary artists. Produced in it's entirety by Marshall, Covers features fully reimagined songs by Frank Ocean, Bob Seger, Lana Del Rey, Jackson Browne, Iggy Pop, The Pogues, Nick Cave, The Replacements and more, plus an updated rendition of her own song InchHateInch from The Greatest (2006), retitled InchUnhateInch for this album. Covers is the first album from Cat Power since Wanderer, her widely-acclaimed 2018 Domino debut, which earned rave reviews and features with the New York Times, The Guardian, The Cut, a NPR Tiny Desk, and a duet with Lana Del Rey on InchWoman,Inch which The New Yorker called a Inchtrembling manifesto.Inch Marshall's work as Cat Power has defied genre and convention, her legacy rippling through the work of a wide range of contemporary musical luminaries. Album Tracks 1. Bad Religion (Frank Ocean Cover) 2. Unhate (Cat Power - Chan Marshall Cover) 3. Pa Pa Power (Dead Man's Bones Cover) 4. White Mustang (Lana Del Rey Cover) 5. A Pair of Brown Eyes (The Pogues Cover) 6. Against the Wind (Bob Seger Cover) 7. Endless Sea (Iggy Pop Cover) 8. These Days (Jackson Browne Cover) 9. It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels (Kitty Wells Cover) 10. I Had a Dream Joe (Nick Cave Cover) 11. Here Comes a Regular (The Replacements Cover) 12. I'll Be Seeing You (Billie Holiday Cover)