Cat Power’s 1998 album Moon Pix typically feels prefer it exists in a world solely separate to our personal, although the feelings it evokes are unmistakably human. Largely written in a single sitting after a terrifying hallucinatory episode, the album strikes at an almost glacial tempo, grounded by little greater than reverb-heavy guitar licks, slowcore-style drum brushes, repeating piano traces, and Chan Marshall’s hazy, whispered croon.
Across 11 tracks, Marshall sings of being haunted by spirits, hell, and different individuals, however largely by her previous and the uncertainty of her future. It’s a disconcerting however deeply highly effective album, and listening to it feels lots like being transported to the world of Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, the place time collapses in on itself and the acquainted is rendered unusual and unsettling.
“He Turns Down” represents Moon Pix at its darkest and most unnerving. Written about Marshall’s sense that her home was being surrounded by spirits, the track is notable for its repeated bursts of flute, which have a hypnotic, Pied Piper-esque high quality. “Have you ever been to that place?/You know I’m not supposed to say,” Marshall whispers in one of many album’s many illusions to hell. Flirting with surrendering to darkish forces, she wearily admits that she’s been “holding on for too long” and, within the track’s last moments, that she’s been rejected by God.
If there’s a singular theme that unites each Moon Pix’s most grounded and otherworldly songs, it’s that sense of rejection. On “No Sense,” Marshall excavates the importance of her reminiscences and tries to work out why a relationship in the end unraveled. As the title suggests, she in the end fails to search out readability: “The moon is so hollow/What’s the use?”
Though there’s a lot longing and uncertainty on the coronary heart of Moon Pix, its most definitive lyrics have come to resemble one thing of a manifesto. “Metal Heart,” the album’s crowning achievement, delivers a dispatch from the brink—“You’re losing the calling that you’ve been faking”—and returns with an uncompromising dedication to “be true” and forged off the confinement of the titular coronary heart. On “You May Know Him,” Marshall flips the narrative of “He Turns Down”: “Oh, Lord,” she cries, “You came through.”
The album’s most staggering assertion stays the six-and-a-half-minute “Color and the Kids,” which finds Marshall biking by a few of her fondest reminiscences and most idealistic visions: building “a shack with an old friend,” paddling on a sandy seaside with rolled-up denims, and being held by somebody who actually is aware of you. Multiple real-life characters, who populate these heat recollections and aspirations, are rolled into the singular character of a yellow-haired “funny bear.” This imprecise and inscrutably described character invitations projection, calling on us to recollect who populates our reminiscences and hopes.
Marshall contrasts these colourful, wondrous photos with stark reminders of present-day actuality. Toward the tip of “Color and the Kids,” she declares, “When we were teenagers, we wanted to be the sky/Now all we wanna do is go to red places/And stay out of hell.” It’s certainly one of a numerous variety of harrowingly minimalist moments scattered throughout Moon Pix, with Marshall’s voice reaching into its higher register and cracking within the course of. It’s a reminder of each how a lot she will be able to do with so little and the way a lot of grownup life is spent on the protection, relatively than offense.
On the album’s cowl artwork, Marshall pushes a cluster of flowers away from her face to permit an unobstructed view at no matter is in entrance of her. It’s an apt accompaniment to the songs, which frequently element the method of dropping one’s naïvete, in addition to the terrors of going through the darkest realities of the world for the primary time. It’s admirable that Marshall by no means collapses underneath the load of such heavy subject material.
On the skeletal last observe, “Peking Saint,” Marshall hints at closure, in the end ending the album with the declaration: “In Peking there is someone who/Is who they should exactly be.” She has described Moon Pix as a supply of “salvation,” and listening to those tales of darkness, redemption, and hope towards the chances 25 years later, it’s not onerous to think about them holding related revelatory energy to anybody discovering them anew.
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