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| The Greatest | 
 enlarge | Artist: Cat Power
Label: Matador Records
Category: Music
List Price: $13.98
Buy New: $5.49
You Save: $8.49 (61%)
Buy New/Used from $5.49
Avg. Customer Rating:  (86 reviews)
Sales Rank: 4265
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 5.6 x 5 x 0.5
MPN: 626
UPC: 744861062622
EAN: 0744861062622
ASIN: B000C0X3ZC
Release Date: March 20, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Cat's still got it, just not as much... August 13, 2007
2 out of 7 found this review helpful
I like this OK, but if you don't have any of her CDs yet, get Moon Pix.
 Cat Power stumbles and takes a nose dive in her songwriting skills. July 29, 2007
3 out of 9 found this review helpful
I'm a man who's listened to the hell out of the CDs "Moon Pix" and had to buy "You Are Free" twice because i listened to it so much. So, I was excited as a school girl when I purchased the new album "The Greatest" but wow was I saddened at how leadin and boring this record is. At first, I thought I've just gotta give it some time. Well, I did; about 10 listens and I still cant hear any melodies. And the backing bad is horrible. I'm sure they were talented in their time but they're past their peak. I live in Chicago and I could throw a stone in any blues bar and I guarantee whoever it hits has got a better band. The prozac Chan is on has her completely sedated and boring.
But as a serious fan and someone who probably has an unhealthy obsession with how hot she is - i soldiered on and thought, "maybe, I've got to see Cat Power perform live and then I'll appreciate the album." Nope, the album is just as boring live and she refused to perform any older material. And the band, cheezzzyyy. They wouldn't even be allowed to play in any Chicago Blues Bar. They'd be laughed outta town with their broken teeth in their hands. I'd been telling everyone about Cat Power for years and once she started getting all this media attention everyone I know bought this album and came back at me with," what kinda wimpy and tedious stuff is this?" Avoid this album, it's not only her worst but the worst and most over-appreciated album of 2006.
Best yet June 15, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Teaming Cat Power with the Hi team who recorded behind Ann Peebles and Al Green was an unexpected and brilliant idea. A special alchemy took place at Ardent Studios in Memphis which enhanced both Cat Power's gorgeous smoky voice and the soulful groove the band has laid down. I would say that that it was worth the price of the album just for the majestic opening song, The Greatest, were it not that it is also available as a single, but that would be to unfairly demean the rest of the record. Of course Cat Power does not need embellishment, as is demonstrated on the unadorned song Hate. Cat's most accomplished album to date.
The Greatest June 8, 2007
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power) is by now well known for her inconsistent live performances. See her on Friday and she'll croon for hours. See her on Saturday and she'll hunch over the piano with a bottle of Jack, muttering diatribes under her breath before running offstage in tears. Taken with her tortured lyricism and sprawling full-lengths, these actions painted Cat Power as simultaneously brazen and insecure, and as such, she helped redefine the notion of the independent musician by living out the discomfort that came from composing exactly what she felt she needed to compose.
So what would Cat Power think upon hearing that she'd receive a hefty recording budget and play with Al Green's hit-makers at the same studio as Dave Matthews and R.E.M.? If you said, "She would run screaming into the night," you're wrong. Abandoning the oblique, quietly angsty indie rock of You Are Free, Cat Power cuts her teeth on Southern soul for her seventh LP, The Greatest. She recorded the album in Memphis at the world-famous Ardent Studios with veteran soul musicians Mabon Hodges, Leroy Hodges and Steve Potts, for a detour into a singer-songwriter's take on Memphis blues-lite.
This is indeed an impressive setup, but The Greatest still falls a bit short. Yes, Potts and the Hodges brothers are supposed to ballast Marshall, not upstage her, but they're not given nearly enough to do--a twang here, a lazy drum fill there, and all performed with a disappointing lack of elan. Fault the studio, too, for rendering the album's second half somewhat limp and same-sounding, and for some of the album's biggest blunders: in roughly half the songs, for example, Marshall's voice appears as a ghosted backing vocal, like a gospel singer from beyond the grave. It's sillier than it sounds.
Cat Power hardly lets these flaws derail the entire album, however, since the strength of her records has always been in the arrangements, vocals and lyrics--not the studio techniques or the backing band. Marshall's voice has never sounded better than it does here; coarsened by whiskey and time, her vocals take on a torchy, sultry tone that fits the music like a glove.
The album's first half also features some of Cat Power's loveliest songs to date. If the gently swinging ditty "Could We" is perfect for playing over the barroom juke as young couples sway on the dance floor, "Lived in Bars" is the moonlit slow-dance after the barroom has closed down for the night. The title track is the album's crown jewel, beginning as an archetypal Cat Power piano arrangement and adding guitars, strings, and a slowly loping drumbeat like ripples in a pond. Far from being a song of fist-pumping glory, "The Greatest" is actually a saddening white flag; Marshall begins, "Once I wanted to be the greatest / No wind or waterfall could stop me." Anyone who knows Cat Power can easily conjecture what becomes of our narrator from here.
Yet what's missing from The Greatest are those gripping moments found on You Are Free and earlier, more overtly tense albums like Myra Lee. There's more drama in a song like "Names" (from You Are Free) than in anything The Greatest has to offer, and it's not because Marshall holds back lyrically; she doesn't, if bald-faced confessions like "I hate myself and I want to die" are any indication. It's because she allowed the Memphis soul theme drive the work to its final destination, and somewhere along the way it became more important to sound pretty than to create something meaningful. The Greatest is Cat Power's most listenable record thus far, but for an artist this willfully difficult, is that really a success?
Cat Power- The Greatest May 20, 2007
3 out of 7 found this review helpful
Awesome CD, great to just relax and listen to while drinking some wine!
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