POP REVIEW; Performance Anxiety: Hiding Onstage

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January 5, 1999, Section E, Page 4Buy Reprints
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A substream of independent-label rock could be called wool-gathering music. It is Spartan folk-rock for downcast college students: mulish, painfully drawn-out, occasionally pretty stuff, dealing obliquely with anxieties and dreams, and it can swing slowly between two chords for many minutes with no embroidery. Its practitioners (including Will Oldham, once of Palace; Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel, and Bill Callahan of Smog) are young, but they sound as if they've lived long, tortured lives.

Chan Marshall, who performs and records under the name Cat Power, is the new wool-gathering princess. She played a set at Bowery Ballroom on Saturday night that was staggering for its inversion of standard rock performance ethics. Gone was the idea of exultation, or of showing what one can do; in its place was outrageously passive-agressive behavior and nonmusicianship. The show was a meaningful comment on current indie-rock esthetics: Ms. Marshall makes music that's the equivalent of a lifeless handshake, but she has enough artistic credibility to sell out the medium-size hall.

Slight and stooped, wearing afterthought clothes, Ms. Marshall cowered through her show, hiding behind a veil of brown hair. (It was hard not to wonder why she lasted for than two hours if she was as terrified of performing as she seemed.) With her expressive, husky voice -- it's her best feature, and it resembles that of another young singer inspired by folk music, Beth Orton -- Ms. Marshall sang songs so deeply interior that they were basically meaningless.

''Learn to say the same thing,'' she sang in ''Say''; ''Let us hold fast to saying the same thing/Never give up/No never give up/If you're looking for something easy you might as well give it up.'' She accompanied herself with single picked notes as shaky as if she had learned how to play yesterday; a guitarist and drummer backed her up empathetically, shambling through the sadness of songs on her new album, ''Moon Pix'' (Matador) and a few ebb-tide versions of tunes by Moby Grape and Fleetwood Mac.

There were a couple of places where Ms. Marshall's concentration held through an entire number. Stepping off the stage and settling down on the floor, she made it through her song ''Cross Bones Style'' with her nose pressed to the ground, while fans patted her on the back to comfort her; later she sang Dimitri Tiomkin's ''Wild Is the Wind,'' achieving the sad, serene state that admirers of her records came to revel in. But for the most part they were watching a train wreck.

Ms. Marshall gave almost every song at least one false start, visibly exasperating her musicians, which she seemed both afraid of doing and consciously trying to do. At one point she asked the crowd, enigmatically, if anyone in the audience had ever felt as if he were walking through a door knowing that a machete was going to fall upon him on the other side. After a silence, she motioned to her band and added, in a trembling voice, ''These guys hate me.''

She forgot lyrics, let the simplest strumming patterns crumble and fall apart, and by the end of her endless set arrived at abject contrition. ''It's not cool,'' she said, berating herself. ''It's not funny. I'm sorry.'' And then she walked off, leaving the crowd in disbelief. Her guitar player strolled to center stage. ''Turn the lights on,'' he instructed. ''It's over.''