Cat Power played the second of her two nearly-sold out gigs at Harlem’s historic Apollo Theater on Saturday night. For almost two hours, vocalist Chan Marshall and the Dirty Delta Blues Band wove in and out of a cover-laden set and lulled the respectful crowd into a dream-like state.

While she played mostly other people’s music with a few originals sprinkled in, she put her own spin on each selection. The show moved at the pace of molasses but was enjoyable in is thickness. Marshall sounded, at times, like Janis Joplin if she weren’t allowed to scream. Often it was a little tough to pick Marshall’s voice out of the mix when the band played beyond hushed tones and her annunciation isn’t the best. But she can belt out a tune like few others and while I never actually fell asleep, I certainly hovered in that space between awake and asleep for a good portion of the night until a slightly more upbeat – and I mean slightly – tune would snap me back to reality.

With the sparsest of lightning and no stage setup to speak of – you could see the heating vents on the back wall of the stage, Marshall spend so much time in the shadows she was reduced to a pair of white shoes and a silky voice for most of us in the Mezzanine.

But the show was streamlined with minimal time between songs and no banter between Marshall and the audience save for throwing some roses into the crowd as she took her final bow.

READ ON for more of Luke’s Cat Power @ The Apollo review…

Her take on Fortunate Son was a highlight and allowed her band, which seemed to be holding back most of the night to let her voice take center stage, a chance to open things up and show their chops.

As a nod to the hometown crowd, which was pin-drop silent for most of the night, the band belted out a barely recognizable version of New York, New York.

The show was impressive but it would have been nice to hear a few truly upbeat songs. I’ve marveled at the Cat Power version of Bob Dylan’s Stuck Inside of Moblle with the Memphis Blues Again from the
I’m Not There Soundtrack since it came out. That, or something with similar energy, would have be a nice change of pace for a few minutes. But what she did she did well and there’s no doubt if you want a mellow night of music, Cat Power delivers.