Cat Power’s new wireless act keeps her fans on their toes

Cat Power went wireless at the Troubadour on Sunday, and the brand-new, unfettered microphone lent a literal quality to the title of her last album, “You Are Free.” The singer got her money’s worth from the device and went free-range through the crowd several times.

Even those who have seen the Atlanta native’s several L.A. appearances since that album was released more than a year ago were kept on their toes -- as were her four band members -- as the predictably unpredictable Cat (real name: Chan Marshall) was, well, unpredictably unpredictable. One minute she seemed on the verge of packing things in as she kept losing her way in a solo song, the next she was making her way through the audience singing along with a recorded backing track (the “pretentious” part of the show, she’d announced) and then the next she was bounding around on stage lip-syncing to a children’s rap song.

In an unplanned encore, which came only after half the crowd refused to leave, she never appeared on stage or in the audience, but sang from some unseen mystery location in the club.

When she was on stage, sitting at a piano or playing guitar, she was cloaked entirely in shadow, the occasional glow of her cigarette at times the only definitive proof of her location.

The scattered quality threatened to undermine her greatest strengths: the intense vulnerability of her songs and the heartbreak of her compelling voice. (Those features have made her an indie-rock icon, with the context of this band placing her music somewhere between Patti Smith and the Cowboy Junkies.) But it never did. Instead, it enhanced the strength/fragility dichotomy of her songs and showed why her fans keep coming back.