Her own style

You don’t go to see Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power, expecting to feel good. Even casual fans of her music are looking for catharsis or a balm to cover wounds like a failed relationship or some of the other disappointments in life.

This is the box that Marshall has painted herself into, achieving early success with tunes like “I Don’t Blame You” and “Good Woman” and other downbeat hits. To her credit, Marshall is unafraid of walking the tight rope, re-working the arrangements  of her songs and challenging whatever expectations her fans may have of her. In a word, she is a brave artist who has been to the brink and back, and is not afraid to go there again whenever she takes the stage.

Fittingly, tonight she slinks onstage in a leather jacket emblazed with a logo on the back that looks like a peace sign but is actually two letters put together, a “C” and a “P” which adorned her latest album “Sun.”

She begins tonight with “The Greatest” and it’s clear that she is doing everything she can, employing two microphones to give her voice a different timbre, and even two drummers to blast through the downbeat rhythms that made her so popular, and even her dramatic appearance on stage with stark lighting and a bleached blonde  boy cut.

There is optimism at the beginning of the set, but one can see that Marshall is not feeling her best, with a bit of a cold maybe as she goes on to songs like “Cherokee” and “3,6,9″ from her latest album “Sun.” However, there is no sequencing of her own back up tracks as the vocals are thinner than the recorded version.

She uses two microphones to overcome this problem, but it’s not effective as it may even prove to be confusing to those at the sound desk. In the end she comes out with “Ruin” along with a bouquet of flowers which she flips in an underhand manner to those in the front row, unknowingly knocking off many petals before they go over the edge of the stage. That’s pretty much what Marshall’s performance was tonight, something beautiful that got a little banged around before it hit the audience.