WHAT WOULD THE COMMUNITY DO

Description

An immense album, "What Would The Community Think" reveals Cat Power: a 24-year-old wild child, whose writing is deep and heartbreakingly beautiful. With Cat Power, there's no ironic hiatus between the charred substance and the burning form. A survivor of some frightful metaphysical shipwreck, a lone girl, with her guitar and her bad luck, sings a terrible blues ("They tell me") forbidden to manicured divas (Cassandra Wilson) and wanton Janis Joplin emulators (Joan Osborne) alike. An immaculate blues that would almost make PJ Harvey's "To Bring You My Love" seem like a Sarah Bernhardt lost on the banks of the Mississippi (or a feminine Jim Morrison). An incredible blues, tinged with pallid gospel, an orphaned lament ("God don't give a shit about me") cried out in echo of Palace's "There is no one what will take care of you". There's country too, of a stellar luminosity ("Taking People"), the kind that the studious Walkabouts have been vainly pursuing for ten years. A country that isn't wordy, deaf to Nashville's rhetoric (no violins, just a tiny puddle of organ and a pinch of pedal-steel), not recommended for second-home buyers but not afflicted with a narrow parochialism or Amish fundamentalism. Beyond the anecdote — Steve Shelley recorded in Memphis — Cat Power seamlessly pairs Hank Williams — "I Can't Help It (If I'm Still in Love With You)," covered on Myra Lee — and Bill Callahan (Smog's admirable "Bathysphere," stripped of its baroque cello and superbly violated on "What Would The Community Think"). Two immense American songwriters proud to endorse "King Rides By," one of those unreasonable songs that infinitely expand the term, without even reaching the regulated four minutes. Here, the paving of Manhattan stretches to the heart of Tennessee; "The Coat Is Always On" invites the monotone voices of Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison reciting "The Murder Mystery"; "Nude As The News" offers a breath of fresh air to Sonic Youth's "Dirty." Cat Power forged her reputation through New York concerts — rumored to be exceptional — but on "What Would The Community Think," the countryside takes its revenge on the proud skyscrapers. An immense album, where the most beautiful nightmares of rural America (dreamed by Nick Cave, painted on film in "The Night of the Hunter" or "The Mirror Child") converge in "Water and Air": "My love has gone down the river / I should be at the bottom of the dark river, embraced by the devil." A story as eternal as it is horrifying, which one would swear here has just been invented by a 24-year-old girl. Enough, indeed, to give the community some cold sweats — we know since "The Scarlet Letter" how little indulgence virtuous America has for illicit loves.