Tripwire Reviews Cat Power Live In London

CAT POWER

London Palladium

Weaving her luminous, soulful, richly expressive voice through Bob Dylan’s songbook, Chan “Cat Power” Marshall gave a spellbinding performance in the Palladium that fell somewhere between devotional sermon and experimental deconstruction. Dylan’s back pages have long figured prominently in Marshall’s covers-heavy career, but her interest has become more like an extended conceptual art project over the last 18 months. Her latest album and live show forensically recreates the folk-rock legend’s fabled “Royal Albert Hall” concert from May 1966, which even casual fans will know was actually recorded at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. Further muddying the waters of Dylan mythology, Marshall recorded her homage album at the real Royal Albert Hall.

Sporting an androgynous dark suit, Marshall radiated jittery intensity as she began this show’s acoustic first act, initially backed by just two players. Ironically, the 52-year-old Atlanta native’s stage persona is the polar opposite of the young Robert Zimmerman, almost pathologically allergic to the spotlight whereas Dylan’s swaggering 1966 self seethed with righteous arrogance and ravenous lust for glory. Thus when she softy crooned Just Like a Woman at the Palladium, it became an achingly tender empathy ballad, not the sneeringly sexist put-down that some rock historians claim. Likewise the withering hipster anthem Ballad of a Thin Man lost some of its scornful proto-punk edge in Marshall’s voluptuous, bluesy, waltz-time makeover, conveying regal Nina Simone-style hauteur more than guttural Lennon-ish disdain.

As on the album, Marshall’s set list exactly replicated Dylan’s original sequencing, including his controversial half-time shift from acoustic to full-band electric arrangements. This meticulous attention to detail was impressive, but not always musically rewarding. Some of the longer numbers dragged, while the singer’s palpable discomfort onstage was often distracting. Most of this show’s spine-tingling peaks came when Marshall veered away from Dylan’s blueprint, taking over-familiar songs to strange new places. Her meandering, husky-voiced rephrasing of Mr. Tambourine Man certainly owed more to avant-garde jazz than folk-rock. Even the swashbuckling finale Like a Rolling Stone was a gentler affair, less spiteful, more sensual. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but sometimes a little creative vandalism is needed for one wildly eccentric musical maverick to find the battered beauty and life-affirming wisdom in another.