About

Indie icon Cat Power — a.k.a. Chan Marshall — has been releasing fine albums of original material for more than 25 years, but imaginative covers have always been a big part of her sound: Her sparse debut LP, “Dear Sir,” which featured a song written by Tom Waits and one by This Kind of Punishment, set the mold for a carefully curated mixture of classic and contemporary tracks written by others.

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“Covers” is actually Marshall’s third all-covers album. She released “The Covers Album” in and “Jukebox” in 2008, the latter arriving in the wake of “The Greatest,” the most commercially successful album of her career, an alternative/NPR-leaning hit that even reached No. 12 on the Billboard 200.

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But ironically, Marshall reinvents and inhabits others’ songs so completely that they sound like originals, and “Covers” is no exception: The songs here veer from just-recognizable to barely recognizable at all, with the focus on her unmistakable voice, often gorgeously multi-tracked and highlighted by spare production.