I first became acquainted with Cat Power’s music through the inclusion of her brilliantly ramshackle track ‘Metal Heart’ on Air’s Late Night Tales mix. Oddly enough, the singer has chosen to rework the track for Jukebox, which otherwise – with the sole exception of Power’s ‘Song To Bobby’ (written about her first meeting with Bob Dylan) – is comprised entirely of cover songs. The new take on ‘Metal Heart’ is nowhere near as good as the original, which unfortunately can be said of most of the material on the album.
Jukebox kicks off with an improbable cover of ‘Theme From New York, New York’, here stripped down into a moody, plaintive arrangement similar in style to Aimee Mann. Though Sinatra’s famous rendition was itself a cover version (the song was originally performed by Liza Minelli in Martin Scorsese’s film New York, New York), there’s no denying that his was the definitive take and it’s difficult to imagine anyone ever topping his vocal performance.
Power certainly has an incredibly beautiful and expressive voice (recently, in this very publication, Thurston Moore stated that his dream band would be fronted by either Power or Kurt Cobain), it’s just that covering big band classics isn’t necessarily putting it to its best use. The majority of songs on Jukebox are performed by Power and her band (which features members of the Dirty Three, Lizard Music and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion) in the same style – a low-key, indie-fied approach that’s diverting without ever being enthralling.
There’s certainly nothing wrong with the source material – other artists covered include James Brown, Hank Williams, Joni Mitchell and Billie Holiday – but the record never really gets going. Which is really a shame when one thinks about what might have been; two of my favourite cover versions of all time, The Cowboy Junkies’ ‘Sweet Jane’ and The Concretes’ ‘Miss You’, were sung by vocalists (Margo Timmins and Victoria Bergsman, respectively) with similar sensibilities to Power. Oh well, maybe the next one, as James Spader says at the end of Cronenberg’s Crash.