More covers from Cat Power

POP
Cat Power Dark End of the Street
Matador
ESSENTIAL "Ye Auld Triangle"

This is another collection of covers from Cat Power, a.k.a. Chan Marshall, an EP of recordings made during the sessions for "Jukebox," the covers album she released in January. Not surprisingly, its revisitations and recombinations are more or less of a piece with the approach of the earlier full-length, and they're far from leftovers.

Marshall is still taking on titans: versions of Otis Redding's "I've Been Loving You Too Long" and Aretha Franklin's "It Ain't Fair" play it relatively straight, albeit with her typical vocal fragility and restraint playing off against the searing Southern soul of her Dirty Delta Blues band. "Dark End of the Street," on the other hand, gets the Cat Power treatment: It's flattened, echoey, almost dirgelike, and adds at least an interesting wrinkle to an interpretive history that towers with the likes of James Carr and Gram Parsons.

"Fortunate Son" fares less well. Marshall applies a similar template to what she did to "New York" on "Jukebox" and to the Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" on 2000's "The Covers Record." She slows the John Fogerty classic down to an inert, affectless crawl that sucks the raging power out of the original.

But when she changes her gaze from the dirty South to the emerald island for a rendition of the modern Irish anthem "Ye Auld Triangle," she grabs the aching beauty at the song's core. (Out now) STUART MUNRO