Chan Marshall is one of a select group of musicians—Ryan Adams and Syd Barrett are two others—whose notoriety has eclipsed their bodies of work. Her biography is a minefield of panic-induced hallucinations, surreal interviews and, most frequently, live performances that ended prematurely because Marshall was crying or because she couldn't remember how the songs went, or because the room felt evil. In fairness, there are people who claim to have witnessed Cat Power shows that bordered on transcendent, just like there are people who claim to have seen Sasquatch and The Day the Clown Cried. As with both of those cases, continued research is probably best left to the fanatics.

What matters is that over a series of bleak and frequently unsettling albums, peaking with 1998's astonishing Moon Pix, Marshall found a way to harness her anxieties, allowing them to inspire and inform her work. In doing so, she turned her neuroses into a text unto itself. This was Cat Power in shorthand: stark, haunted songs that hinted at a deep and terrifying emotional fragility.

That modus changed drastically with "I've Been Thinkin'," a track sung by Marshall on an otherwise thuddingly mediocre 2004 Handsome Boy Modeling School record. Over a shuffling backbeat and a hoot-owl guitar pattern, Marshall cooed and sighed and teased, her usually chalky voice suddenly revealing a startling husk and depth. Each note was like the flick of a moist, pink tongue, evincing a kind of assurance and poise and command that—for the first time—made the Power part of Marshall's moniker seem like more than a cruel joke.

The Greatest, Marshall's seventh album, should have been the natural extension of that remarkable discovery. Recorded at the legendary Ardent Studios in Memphis with a band featuring Flick and Teenie Hodges—who backed Al Green on the best parts of his catalog and who therefore are no strangers to dealing with crazies—the record has both the locale and the personae necessary to baptize Marshall a bona fide soul singer.

What the record doesn't have, unfortunately, is any actual soul. Flat, listless and demure to a fault, The Greatest is a charmless chore, the kind of record where high-concept subs in for halfhearted execution. It's a classic case of form without animus; "Living Proof," festooned with gurgling Hammonds and bleating brass, should be the record's showstopper, but Marshall demonstrates an irritating refusal to commit to the verse. Its stanzas are built from tight, four-syllable phrases that beg to be hit hard, but Marshall just sorta shrugs them out, as if she's dazed or distracted. She does this over and over, shying away from the corkscrewing "airplanes in the air" verse-cram in "Lived in Bars," and all but whispering the pussyfootin' blue-country pastiche "After It All."

It's not just Marshall who comes up short. The production is humid and airless, muting the instruments until they're little more than a polite murmur. The songs are well-intentioned but empty, with no real momentum or arc. It's got the same kind of wheatiness as a Natalie Merchant record, all pursed lips and joyless joy, the kind of Serious Music people think they have to listen to when they start feeling alienated by the radio. Even without the soul album meta-baggage, it's a disappointment, a record full of ideas that never graduate and become songs. What's missing is the risk or the need or the danger that informs not only the best moments in R&B, but the best moments in the Cat Power catalog to date. And therein lies the paradox: Chan Marshall made her best and truest soul songs before she ever set foot in Ardent. At its best, American soul and country summon the small epiphanies that happen during the day-to-day. The only revelation afforded by "Living Proof" is how much better it might sound if Mary J. Blige were singing.

Warn DeFever—himself oddball enough to have once made a record because a woman in a dream told him to—knows well these dangers. In 2001 his group, His Name Is Alive, made their own ill-conceived soul record, a velvety piece of lovers schlock called Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth. Where The Greatest is merely dull, Blues was reverential to a fault, the sonic equivalent of Gus Van Sant's Psycho.

DeFever seems to have taken those lessons to heart with Detrola, the group's first record in four years and a sharp, inventive return to form. Rather than mimeographing old Motown fake books, DeFever uses the Holland-Dozier-Holland catalog as a jumping-off point, dismantling and rebuilding it to fit his own fragmented aesthetic. "I Thought I Saw" is "Where Did Our Love Go" by way of Stereolab, the rich alto of "Andrea" (aka, I'm told, "Andy FM") working against DeFever's busy, buzzy arrangement. Detrola isn't a soul record in the strictest sense (or even in the loosest), but it's impossible to imagine DeFever making this record without going through the fiasco of Blues (or its barely-released sequel, Last Night). Those albums shifted his entire aesthetic away from the structure-fucking that characterized the group's earliest work to songs infused with a new tenderness and a firm, melodic anchor. It's kind of a thrill to spot the reference points—the lonesome moan on "Get Your Curse" evokes Dusty Springfield while the riverside gospel of "Send My Face" is "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean"—but it's even more thrilling to just let the record slowly unfold. It may not share The Greatest's impressive pedigree, but it somehow feels a lot closer to the source.