A NYT review today of a Cat Power show at a club called Terminal 5 in Manhattan skirts around an issue that is common at shows but almost never gets its due in reviews:

Terminal 5, on far West 56th Street, was hardly big enough to accommodate Ms. Marshall’s fans on Wednesday, though it was a good deal bigger than the music seemed to demand. Drawing from her new album, “Jukebox” (Matador), Ms. Marshall and her crew played blearily soulful covers of songs associated with Hank Williams, James Brown, Jessie Mae Hemphill and George Jackson. In a less cavernous room the results might have been haunting. The sound surely would have been better.

The review is by the Times’ Nate Chinen. He finally returns to the issue of the sound at the show in this last graf:

To Ms. Marshall’s great credit, the show went off without any unscheduled interruptions, despite the sound-system feedback that plagued almost every song. Though justifiably frustrated, she allowed herself just one small act of protest, lying on her back for a few verses of the old Patsy Cline hit “She’s Got You.” Then she pointed one leg in the air, slowly swung it in an arc above her, and nimbly rose to her feet.

I don’t know what any of this means. Should Marshall get credit for not interrupting her own show? Great credit? And who in the world was she frustrated at? There is a prevalent attitude among too many reviews that the artist is a tool of some unseen forces that create the show around him or her. It’s not; it’s the creation of the person who’s taking your money! Live audio has made truly wonderful advances in the last decade or two; most major arena shows I’ve seen recently have been perfect. Most dedicated rock clubs, too, have control of their own acoustics at this point. But there are a wide range of mid-level venues that take some work to get the sound right for a rock show. Last time I looked, that was a job the artist is getting paid to do.