Cat Power's 'Moon Pix' 20th Anniversary Show Turned Darkness Into Triumph

Every June around VIVID, Sydney’s festival of lights and culture, the city glows. Luminous light fixtures, technicolour art installations, and lucid projections are projected onto high-rise buildings and the Sydney Opera House. The Harbour Bridge is adorned with fluorescent lights. Inside the Opera House’s Concert Hall, things are a little different. Chan Marshall is about to perform her classic 1998 album Moon Pix in full. The stage is bare besides instruments. A red curtain hangs behind.

The mood fits: There isn’t much light on Moon Pix. Recorded over five days in Melbourne’s Sing Sing Studios with Dirty Three’s Jim White and Mick Turner, the elegiac indie-rock record, is considered by fans and critics to be the 46-year-old American’s best work. While the presence of White and Turner is certainly felt, the album feels undoubtedly American: A kind of kind of blistering, despondent Southern Gothic.

The album’s spectral, hallucinatory mood has much to do with the conditions in which Marshall wrote the album; a story that has, in-part, cemented Marshall’s mythology as a brooding, troubled singer-songwriter. After spending months in South Africa, Mozambique and Tanzania (an experience she has said “detented” her) she returned to the States, bought a truck and drove aimlessly for miles until she stumbled upon a sign to a small town in South Carolina called, of all things, Prosperity. Here, Marshall spent three months in a farmhouse. One morning, as Marshall has told it, she was visited by evil spirits that tried to cajole her into leaving the house. She ran around frantically shutting all of the windows, only to have thousands of these spirits scratching at the kitchen window, trying to get into her soul. Amidst this episode, Marshall reached for her guitar and wrote most of the songs that appear on Moon Pix. “I thought that if people found my body, I needed to leave a tape”, she told the Telegraph.

Since Moon Pix, Marshall's career has zig-zagged. There have been dives into delicate soul (The Greatest), thoughtful, unique cover albums (The Covers Record and Jukebox) and fully-realised bluesy rock (You Are Free). Her latest LP, 2012’s Sun, was a stark change of pace. Full of sparkly synths and piano-pop, it was her first album to crack the Billboard top ten in America.

The crowd that gathers in the Concert Hall is made up of older fans, but there are nearly as many young women, sipping red wine out of plastic cups, taking group selfies, speaking in hushed tones about idols in a similar vein to Marshall like Patti Smith and Fiona Apple. The audience is bubbling, but there’s also trepidation in the air. Since Moon Pix, Marshall has built up a reputation for being especially capricious on stage: There have been breakdowns and tears, strained, awkward performances, long pauses, rambling monologues and lots of apologising.

The band––featuring Turner and White, Moon Pix’s original flautist Belinda Woods, and a small string section arranged by Ned Colette––emerges first, launching into the backwards drum loops on album opener “American Flag”. The audience howls in recognition. Marshall, dressed in a long, velvet dress and knee-high boots walks onstage moments later, only to disappear almost immediately, leaving the band to repeat the same opening bars until she emerges again, notes in hand, a cigarette sandwiched between her fingers.

At first, there are a few fumbles, and Marshall’s jumpy disposition is visible. But after each song, she becomes increasingly more relaxed, and then emboldened, dancing loosely around the front of the stage, and modulating her voice to new, smokier territory. Despite the lush string section, moody guitars, and stomping drums, it’s Marshall's voice––husky, straining, honeyed––that is most stirring. It beams mostly during the languid, warped blues of “Moonshiner” and “Say” where Marshall sings with increasing force, “If you're looking for something easy/ You might as well give it up” as string instruments swell around her. Sometimes, the arrangements feel off. On “Metal Heart”, one of Marshall’s best songs, the orchestral sweeps and thundering guitars completely subsume her vocals, losing what made the song so moving in the first place.

Listening to Moon Pix feels like being consumed in someone else’s subconscious. It almost feels intrusive. Songs drift in and out, and Mashall’s voice swings from a rasping howl to a despairingly breathy murmur. On stage, it sometimes feels jarring to see such introverted songs amplified to a crowd of around 2000 people. But it’s this inwardness that’s also the album’s greatest asset. Marshall’s music has always been especially attuned to the pleasures and perils of solitude, and it’s the reason why her work, and especially Moon Pix, has consistently drawn the devotion of new fans years later.

After the band finishes playing the album in full, Marshall reemerges, teacup in hand, playing the piano alone for “Dark End of the Street”,“I Don’t Blame You” and an unfamiliar, new song which leads with the refrain “nothing really matters”. Marshall’s between-song banter is minimal, and it seems like she’s more than happy for audience members to fill in the silence between songs. “Thanks for coming back!” someone screeches. “Happy birthday Moon Pix!” yells another. She replies with a whisper: “Thank you.” As the night draws to a close, she even lets various audience members introduce the band for her.

But after she plays an encore accompanied by the band, closing with the “The Greatest”, she addresses the crowd directly: “Thank you all for accepting me. I don’t know how many of you knew me when I was crazy. I’m sure there are people in the audience crazier than me. I hope you find the same blessings coming to you. It’s good for us to take notice when we’re doing well.”

In an old interview with Rolling Stone, a journalist suggested to Marshall that her fans are drawn to her music because of its sadness. To this, she replied “I don't ever think it's sad. I think the songs are somehow triumphant, because there's realisation and acceptance, which is kind of a triumph.” At the end of the show, Marshall receives a standing ovation. I’m reminded again of her enduring strength as an artist, one she showcased again at the Moon Pix show: moving through trepidation to triumph.

Isabella Trimboli is the editor of Gusher Magazine, rock criticism written by women. Follow her on Twitter.