Cat Power: You Are Free (Matador OLE 427-1/2)
First, the name. However stealthy and mysterious the music that Chan Marshall makes as Cat Power, her chosen handle has little to do with felines. Rather, the 31-year-old singer is named for a slogan on a workman's cap, extolling the virtues of Caterpillar earth-moving equipment. It was the early Nineties, she was starting to play her first nervous shows in New York City, she needed a name, the guy in the hat was standing there. Hey presto: a thousand slinky metaphors unwittingly unleashed.
Indeed, 'power' is a curious term to associate with Marshall's work. Her voice is a parched and ghostly instrument, sometimes deployed at a whisper, often multi-tracked for maximum wooziness. The songs them selves can be skeletal, too. Fleshed out by a smattering of piano keys or a dusty guitar line, the impact of Marshall's songs does not lie in their forcefulness. Rather, it's their haunting minimalism that floors you; the vast understatements that fill out her six-odd albums, the persistence of her will-o'-the-wisp vision.
The shorthand that pegs Marshall as a female Will Oldham (Bonnie Prince Billy, Palace) only tells half the story. An Atlanta native, Marshall draws on American folk music, country and the blues; but the rural origins of her influences are refracted through an urban lens, through rock'n'roll and ugly, modern things. Here, 'Names' unflinchingly tells of childhood friends lost to abuse and drugs.
You Are Free is probably Marshall's most accessible album to date. It boasts a bona fide pop song ('Free'), some rock instrumentation and downright cogent tunes like 'Good Woman', a stark, echoey folk meditation on leaving love, surrounded by the safety net of structure. Marshall's songs - especially live - can easily fracture and tail off as her mood alters; she covered The Rolling Stones's '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' on 2000's The Covers Record and left out the famous chorus. And the trademark riff.
There are huge rock stars on here, too, coyly abbreviated to DG and EV. These are Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters, Nirvana) and Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam) - but she barely lets them do anything, reducing Grohl, the most muscular drummer in the world, to a pitter-patter. The string arrangements, meanwhile, are by Beck's dad. It's not so much that Chan Marshall is well-connected; it's more that word of her unique talents has finally spread beyond the independent underground. Before this, she recorded 1998's magnificent Moon Pix album in Australia with The Dirty Three, and before that she was helped by Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley.
But for every 'I Don't Blame You' on this record - a stunning opening ballad about a reluctant rock star that could as easily be about Kurt Cobain as any of her many musician associates - there's a 'Shaking Paper', a rattly project whose sense only comes with the lines 'Demons despise the sound of shaking paper'.
For all her increasing confidence and marketability as an artist - the patronage by famous photographers, the Gap ads - the truth of Cat Power lies somewhere altogether more uncertain. Hers is a world that abuts other worlds closely, where demons, ghosts, dreams and premonitions cross freely.
The songs that became Moon Pix, for example, were prompted by voices calling her into the fields at night. She ignored them, and got out her guitar as protection. Doctors assure her she is sane but there is a sense - as with Kristin Hersh, Throwing Muses' singer and solo artist - that Marshall is in thrall to her songs: that they might write her.
You could buy You Are Free as a nice comedown album, thinking that it might be a slightly challenging update on Beth Orton, but be warned. It could lodge deep into your secret places and not leave.
· To order You Are Free for £13.99 incl. p&p, call the Observer Music Service on 0870 066 7813