Seattle Film Blog: Case 137, Franz, Lady, Mārama, Powwow People, and more to come. Plus,
High Art and Lenny[Criterion Collection Blu-rays]
Video Librarian: Green Is the New Red and The Librarians.
Unassigned: Barbarella[Blu-ray set], The Bat[Blu-ray], The Betrayal [Blu-ray], Blood Money: $10,000 Blood Money, Find a Place to Die, Vengeance Is Mine, and Matalo![four Blu-ray set], Borsalino[Blu-ray], Desperate Teenage Lovedolls & Lovedolls Superstar: The Complete 4K Remastered Collection [Blu-ray], Fighting Back[Blu-ray], Flaming Brothers[Blu-ray], The Iron-Fisted Monk[Blu-ray], Last House on the Left[Blu-ray/UHD set], New First of Fury [Blu-ray], The Prodigal Son[Blu-ray], Savage Guns: Four Classic Westerns, Vol 3: El Puro, Four of the Apocalypse, I Want Him Dead, and Wrath of the Wind[four Blu-ray set], and That Most Important Thing: Love.
I've written about Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power, a few times: a 2012 review of Sun for The Stranger's Line Out music blog, a 2018 review of the Wanderer for The Stranger, and a concert preview for the same paper the same year. All Most have disappeared from the internet, and even the Wayback Machine can't find them, so here are a few random thoughts drawn from one concert, but many years of listening to and writing about her.
This Paramount concert was my third time seeing Cat Power after a somewhat tentative solo acoustic set at Bumbershoot in 1999 and a more confident full band set at Showbox at the Market in 2018.
The image below is intentionally blurry, because she performed in semi-darkness. In boosting my images--not counting shots of the venue and the crowd--everything blurred out. I believe it's how she deals with stage discomfort, since the light was never on her face, but always on her keyboard player, possibly for sheet music-reading purposes. To my surprise, Chan also referred to sheet music, though not often.
She went on 30+ minutes after the 8pm start time, and no one seemed to mind, not least because of the artists playing on the PA beforehand (there was no opening act): Al Green, James Brown, the Supremes, Roberta Flack, Sam and Dave, Irma Thomas, and Joe Tex.
Grace Jones did the same at the Moore Theatre in 2022, and it only seemed to stoke anticipation for her worth-the-wait appearance.
As advertised, Chan performed the entirety of 2006 album The Greatest, but performed several other songs, too, like 2012's "Manhattan," but not "Up and Gone" from the limited edition version or Felice and Boudleaux Bryant's "All I Have to Do Is Dream" from the Japanese edition. The original soulful material, recorded at Memphis's Ardent Studios with Green and Booker T. and the MGs veterans, sounded more like Rolling Stones-style blues rock with this band.
Her voice, in its jazzy, improvisatory textures, has never sounded more like Strange Weather-era Marianne Faithfull--she's starting to look like her, too--though she sounded like Bobbie Gentry on one track (I forget which one). Mostly though, she sounded like herself.
The show was 90 minutes altogether, culminating in a standing ovation, and had me home by 10:30pm on a Friday night...and I am absolutely not complaining. I don't much miss the late-night club shows of the grunge years.
Overall, good stuff from a lady who has been through some...stuff. At one point, she joked about a former partner, and everyone laughed, because I think we all knew who she meant: actor/cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi, with whom she had a tempestuous relationship--their breakup inspired the album Sun.
It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels (J.D. Miller cover)
Shattered / Manhattan (snippet of Shattered by the Rolling Stones as vocal intro)
I'll Be Seeing You (Sammy Fain cover)
I think this is the fourth time I've seen a musician or band perform the entirety of a single album: Massive Attack and Liz Fraser with Mezzanine in 2019, Scritti Politti with Cupid & Psyche 85 in 2021, and Kim Deal with Nobody Loves You More last year. For more information about The Greatest tour, which is shockingly robust--it continues through November--please see this page at the Domino site.
Other than the review of a Kim Deal concert, I didn't do any music writing this year for the first time in a good long while, so it was harder than usual to keep up with new releases, even though I'm still on several mailing lists--and I didn't keep up with any reissues or collections at all.
To that end, respect to RVNG Intl. and 12XU for releasing some of my favorite albums this year, and a fond adieu to Trouble in Mind. Every year, I used to look forward to their new releases. It's a Herculean task to keep an independent act or label going in the post-millennial era, especially once the pandemic hit, so here's to all those who have.
Respect also to John Whitson, the founder of Holy Mountain Records, and a social media associate with whom I shared many friends. I regret that I never got to meet him in person. This year we also lost music writers Kaleb Horton and Charles Cross, completely unexpected passings of gentlemen with a lot left to say--in Cross's case, he was just getting started on a memoir. We'll not see the likes of any of these three again; each their own, unmistakable, much-missed individual.
Top 10
1. Lucrecia Dalt - A Danger to Ourselves (RVNG Intl.)
2. Nightmares On Wax - Echo45 Sound System (Warp)
3. Go Kurosawa - soft shakes (Guruguru Brain)
4. Marie Davidson - City of Clowns (DEEWEE/Because Music)
5. Little Simz - Lotus (AWAL Recordings)
6. Anika - Abyss (Sacred Bones)
7. Cate Le Bon - Michelangelo Dying (Mexican Summer)
8. Ty Segall - Possession (Drag City)
9. Melody's Echo Chamber - Unclouded (Domino)
10. Decius - Decius Vol. II (Splendour & Obedience) (The Leaf Label)
Runners-up
11. The Hard Quartet - The Hard Quartet (Matador)
12. Wet Leg - Moisturizer (Domino)
13. Stereolab - Instant Holograms on Metal Film
(Duophonic UHF Disks/Warp)
14. Lily Allen - West End Girl (BMG)
15. Horse Lords & Arnold Dreyblatt FRKWYS Vol. 18:
Extended Field (RVNG Intl.)
16. Horsegirl - Phonetics On and On (Matador)
17. Taba - Satomimagae (RVNG Intl.)
18. L'eclair - Cloud Drifter (Innovative Leisure)
19. Clipse - Let God Sort Them Out (ROC Nation Distribution)
20. The Cords - The Cords (Slumberland)
Note: Call me crazy, but I'd rather watch Austin Butler run through the streets of New York City than Timothée Chalamet. To each their own, I guess, but Caught Stealing is also a great cat movie with a truly great cat in veteran performer Tonic, who plays Butler's "Bud."
21. John Glacier - Like a Ribbon (Young)
22. Sault - 10 (Forever Living Originals)
23. Pulp - More (Rough Trade)
24. Water Damage - Instruments (12XU)
25. Natural Information Society - Meditation (New Soil Limited)
26. Natural Information Society - Manifestation (New Soil Limited)
5. Mateus Alves and Tomaz Alves Souza - The Secret Agent (Lakeshore)
6. Johan Lenox - The Plague (OST) (Waxwork)
7. Anika and Jim Jarmusch - Father Mother Sister Brother (Sacred Bones)
8. Ludwig Göransson - Sinners (OST) (Sony Masterworks)
9. Jonny Greenwood - One Battle After Another (OST) (Nonesuch)
Notable concerts (unranked): Ty Segall (solo acoustic) with King Tuff at the Neptune, Kim Deal with Morgan Nagler at the Neptune, Branford Marsalis live score for silent Armstrong biopic Louis at the Paramount, and Wet Leg with Mary in the Junkyard at the Paramount.
I write about popular music and film and the relationship between the two. I'm Irish on one side, Italian on the other—British on both. I was born in Connecticut (Far From Heaven), raised in Alaska (Northern Exposure), and I've lived in Seattle, WA (Trouble in Mind) since 1988.
