IN THE DAYS WHEN YOU WERE HOPELESSLY POOR/I JUST LIKED YOU MORE. Have spun Cat Power’s new record, “You Are Free,” several times (uh, but only twice all the way through, for reasons I will explain pronto), and can’t recommend it. I’m glad I have it because I am a huge, colossal Cat Power fan. But if you are not already fanatical about the howlin’ chanteuse, DO NOT buy the new record. Instead, PLEASE, go get yourself her amazing first record, “Myra Lee.” Let me tell you why.

Let’s start with the new record. When I first played it, I thought it was catchy and pretty cool. It’s a mild thrill to hear Chan Marshall (the voice, words, and stumbling guitar of Cat Power) backed by instruments that, you know, harmonize. Songs with symmetry, grace, pop polish. It’s also great to hear Marshall just face up and sing without the waify softness she used way too often on her most recent albums, “The Covers Record” and “Moon Pix.”

And there are some great moments in the first half of the disc. “Good Woman,” while maybe too quiet, is a blunt, harsh country tearjerker (“I want to be a good woman/And I want for you to be a good man/this is why I will be leaving…”). “I Don’t Blame You” and “Free” had me nodding along with a rueful grin. But even in those two songs, some problems start to creep in: the lyrics of “I Don’t Blame You” and the vocals in “Free” are kind of petulant, kind of rock-star-pouts-re-own-celebrity. Marshall has often used her high-lonesome voice to convey resentment, usually to terrific effect (“Mr. Gallo,” “Three Times,” “Enough”), but I get the impression that now we’re supposed to think that resentment is cool. (The lyrics of “Free” are pretty sweet–“It’s okay if you can’t stand to let her dance/It’s okay it’s your right…”–nice jab at the ways we twist freedom into compulsion and coercion–and even the poor-little-celeb-girl lyrics are good–it’s just her voice that gets smirky.)

Things get more problematic as the songs get more political. Marshall used to break your heart singing bleakly, “All the lies aside, I believe I am the luckiest person alive”; now she tosses out cheap shots about Americans’ complacent “fortunacy” (?? don’t ask me why the lapse into Bushspeak). “Names” is a potentially affecting song about children the narrator used to know, children doomed by parental cruelty and other circumstances. (Title + lyrics reminded me of Dorothy Allison’s painful essay, “River of Names,” the epic catalogue of seemingly foreordained disasters that had burned through her family tree.) Maybe it’s just because by the time I got to this song I was already annoyed, but it struck me as vaguely exploitative, and didn’t really add anything besides, “Here’s a list of children to whom horrible things happened, doesn’t that suck.”

Marshall’s songs are often opaque–any ideas on what the actual plotline of “Wealthy Man” is??–but in “Shaking Paper” the mysterizing gets frustrating rather than allusive. “Wealthy Man,” from “Myra Lee,” is an incredible, suggestive homage to the subjunctive tense–“Maybe I will dream that you would tell me/You’ve always been thinking of me,” Marshall sings, crawling through about six levels of disconnection and alienation. “Shaking Paper,” from the new album, isn’t nearly that subtle; it struck me as a basic anti-war, isn’t it sad that young men hold guns, moral-equivalence song, with the only real question being what the heck “shaking paper” refers to (“and demons despise the sound of shaking paper/but guess what/I found out/that you do too”).

There’s a lot less isolation in “You Are Free” than in the earlier records (especially “Myra Lee” and “Dear Sir”). There’s a lot less creepy, unsettling, “you’d edge away if this person sat next to you on the bus” characterization. There’s a lot less of the howl, a lot less resignation, a lot less of what makes Cat Power unique. (I mean, “Baby Doll” is basically a slightly better version of PJ Harvey’s “Dress,” which is… okay, I guess.)

Chan Marshall has a startling, ice-axe-for-the-frozen-sea-within talent. She’s not like anything else out there. I heard “Myra Lee” on a scratchy dubbed tape in a friend’s car, and immediately knew I had to hear more. It hurts to hear her sanding down the edges of her rough, splintery talent.

BEST CAT POWER SONGS for your listening pleasure:

1) “Ice Water,” “Wealthy Man,” “We All Die,” “Great Expectations”: All from “Myra Lee.” All angry heartbreakers. “I’m not made of successful things.”

2) “Rockets,” “Mr. Gallo,” “Yesterday Is Here.” From “Dear Sir.”

3) “Bathysphere.” I forget where this is. Quiet memory of something that was lost. “When I was seven/My father said to me/that you can’t swim/And I never dreamed of the sea again… I want to live in a bathysphere.”

4) “Moonshiner,” “Still in Love with You.” More covers. Mmmm.

5) “Fate of the Human Carbine.” Stupid title; sad, incisive song about peepshows. Lyrics.

6) “Three Times,” “Enough.” Resentment never sounded so good.

7) “Good Clean Fun” (“After this there will be no more good clean fun”); “Nude as the News” (weird song but starts off with “I still have a flame gun/For the cute, cute, cute ones…” which won my heart).