The post-hardcore album that changed Cat Power’s life
Cat Power has consistently found herself on the fringes of rock and roll. Despite being one of the most prevalent voices in the field, Power has always prided herself on making music that caters to people who aren’t necessarily looking to become rich and famous, looking to inhabit characters or create songs that evoke a feeling rather than follow a straight narrative. While shades of artists are as varied as Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell coat most of her work, one of Power’s main influences comes from the punk world.
For as much as her work is indebted to the sounds of folk-rock, the ethos of all excellent punk rock comes from being the voice of the people. Regardless of what she’s singing about, Power has been able to meet her audience at ground level, making songs that get to the humanity behind her character rather than trying to preach from a pulpit.
In the wake of artists like Dylan, who were shaking up the system in the late 1960s, the sounds of punk were just getting born with acts like The Stooges and The MC5. Taking the rudiments of rock and roll and putting mountains of attitude behind them, each band’s material would help pave the way for what acts like Sex Pistols and Ramones would be doing a few years later, focusing on the attitude rather than the complexity of a song.
Once the punk wave collapsed, the hardcore scene quickly picked up where it left off, featuring groups channelling their angst through the most raucous performances they could muster. While many of these outfits weren’t concerned with sounding catchy, Hüsker Dü was slowly adopting a middle ground between punk thrashiness and rock and roll melodicism.
Fronted by Bob Mould, the band would become one of the most inventive punk acts of their era, creating songs that had the ferocity of punk with massive hooks on tracks like ‘Don’t Want To Know If You Are Lonely’. Although Power was interested in many facets of their discography, she pointed to the EP Metal Circus as the album that got her invested.
Featuring a handful of odds and ends made after their debut release, Everything Went Wrong, most of the band’s anger is on full display, making works that could compete with Metallica regarding raw aggression. Amid the musical chaos, Power remembered being transfixed by what she was hearing.
Discussing the track with Readers Digest, Power realised how much the album changed her life, recalling, “It’s a post-hardcore sort of sound; there are hints of thrash, hints of a lot of different things. Just put on the song ‘Diane’, because that will tell you everything you need to know. It’s a three-piece, guitar-based and drums. Sadly, it’s the one band that I never got to see live.”
While Power may have gone in a completely different direction from what Metal Circus did, the group’s mentality of working off each other has remained with her. From her various indie rock masterpieces to her most recent ventures covering Bob Dylan, Power has still held on to making the most out of each instrument at play, looking to capture a feeling while making something people could sing along to.
