describes as “breathing through a fire THE CRITICS hose.” “I’ve never really listened to my voice and gone, That is a quality instru- ment,” she told me. “It’s more like, O.K., that’s good and fucking loud.” She added, “I’m kind of the horn section of any band I’m in.” Without Case’s voice, the Boyfriends records would have been fairly un- remarkable country-rock albums. It is ironic that Case, of all people, would be pop music so fond of reverb, an effect whose me- tallic curve can sometimes obscure a truly great voice but is a boon to mod- the winds est singers. (The Jesus and Mary Chain would be a couple of links short with- Neko Case is the horn section. out the reverb.) Case’s tone has the glint and the bruised shading of well-han- by sasha frere-jones dled brass, her pitch is merciless, and when the throttle is open her chest voice he title of Neko Case’s new album, indulgences held in check by a quick is more than a mere horn section: Case “Middle Cyclone,” is a reference to pulse. is an event, a force that sets off things T“mesocyclone,” the core rotational struc- The wide-open spaces and narrow around it. ture of a thunderstorm, which can pro- hopes of the characters in “Middle Cy- duce a tornado. This was not my inter- clone” could come from any of the many ne of the Vancouver groups that pretation of the phrase, which I took stages of Case’s life. Born in Virginia, Case has worked with is the ener- as a commentary on age, and on how Case spent most of her youth in and geticO pop-rock band the New Pornog- Case turned thirty-eight last year: hair around Tacoma, Washington, leaving raphers. The band’s principal songwrit- flying, throat open, poorly secured items home at fifteen for Vancouver, where ers are A. C. Newman, who has a knack be damned. Case’s work on “Middle she played drums in punk-rock bands. for twisting melodies which recalls that Cyclone”—the best of her career by a She lived for five years in Tucson, and of Squeeze’s Glenn Tilbrook, and the generous margin, and every song her recently moved to Vermont, where she prolix Dan Bejar, who writes mainly for own except for two covers—addresses bought a farmhouse and a defunct post his band Destroyer. Case’s role with the youth, aging, marriage, death, change, office, to use as a rehearsal space. She New Pornographers has been largely as and all that knobby stuff you run over is an avid defender of animals (the a voice—she does not write with the on the way to your midpoint. song “I’m an Animal” is not all that band. But a song like Newman’s “The Nature and violence are the forces at metaphorical, apparently) and has lived Laws Have Changed,” a magnificent work in “Middle Cyclone.” Mocking- much of her life in places where cars and clever work from 2003 that implic- birds sing, ants march, and the sky drops and guns usually go together, and fast. itly likened the Bush family to ancient- marbles on Case’s characters. The Sis- If you can’t tell how far Case is throw- Egyptian rulers, does not peak fully tine Chapel is “painted with a Gatling ing her voice as a writer, she gives you until Case enters, singing, in chorus gun,” and the characters in “People Got a big cue in “Vengeance Is Sleeping,” with her own voice, “Introducing for the a Lotta Nerve” are all types of trouble— when she sings, “I’m not the man you first time, Pharaoh on the microphone.” one is a “man-eater,” another eats “hearts think I am.” You can’t help cheering along with the of sharks.” Case sums up this scenario— Case began recording in the nineties, royalty for three minutes. after a long pull on a cheap cigarette, with a revolving band of musicians billed As the New Pornographers grew in one hopes—by singing, “It will end as Neko Case and Her Boyfriends. Their popularity, so did Case, who made again in bullets, friend.” sound, as Case described it, was like “Blacklisted,” her first full-length Boy- “Middle Cyclone” isn’t an album “a bunch of kids trying to reproduce friendless record, in 2002; it was her last that breaks apart the world with new some sort of Owen Bradley magic.” and best iteration of the countrified sounds. It has the same feel as R.E.M.’s Case and her band took elements— middle ground. The attraction to mid- “Murmur,” Meat Puppets’ “Up on the pedal-steel guitar, loads of reverb on century country music, especially when Sun,” or X’s “Under the Big Black Sun,” the voice—of the so-called “Nashville it goes a-waltzing, makes sense. Like perfectly formed rock albums from the sound” that Bradley helped create for Nashville ballads, Case’s songs tend to- eighties that emerged from the nest of singers like Patsy Cline. At first, Case’s ward long, luxurious phrases that suit punk rock, steeped in a love of older take on country was engaging, mostly her voice. (By contrast, she cites “nim- music and newer sounds, with self- because of her voice, which Case herself ble” vocalists, like her backup singer

Nature and violence are the forces at work in “Middle Cyclone”—easily Case’s best album. Photograph by Elinor Carucci.

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TNY—2009_03_16—PAGE 99—133SC.—live art r18269—critical cut to be watched throughout entire press run! thank TNY—2009_03_16—PAGEyou. 99—133SC. Kelly Hogan, as people with voices as savvy about bizarre transitions or chords precise as “coping saws.” “They’re like or how to shift from one time signature little mountain goats—they’re just hop- to another.” The opening number, “This ping up the cliffs,” she said.) Tornado Loves You,” moves steadily Case’s change in writing style began forward on Barry Mirochnick’s train- with “The Tigers Have Spoken” (2004), track beat and a quickly echoing guitar an album of songs recorded live. The that could be a quieter figure from a U2 material is mostly covers—several tradi- album. Case fuses the personal and the tional numbers, Loretta Lynn’s “Rated natural instantly: “My love, I am the X,” and “Loretta,” by the obscure late- speed of sound. I left them motherless, seventies Boston group Nervous Eat- fatherless, their souls dangling inside ers—combined with four Case origi- out from their mouths. But it’s never nals, including “Favorite.” It’s a waltz, a enough—I want you.” The singer carves time signature that Case leans on a lit- with “bloody hides” and leaves “broken tle heavily, and though the textures are necks” in the ditch, clearing an area country, the melodies have become lon- “sixty-five miles wide.” There is no ob- ger, the chord changes a little stranger, vious tipoff—is this Case’s heart or her and the themes more Case’s own. (She countryside come to life? hits a deer with her car, but only in a There are dozens of moments of dream.) vocal delight here: Case soaring on the The next release, “Fox Confessor words “blue, blue baby” in “The Pha- Brings the Flood,” from 2006, is in raohs”; blending her voice with Paul some ways the first Neko Case album. Rigby’s rapid fingerpicking and the Country music is mostly perceptible in singing of Lucy Wainwright Roche and the reverb, now dialled back. Case’s Kelly Hogan on “Vengeance Is Sleep- words are more like passages from nov- ing”; building steadily on “I’m an Ani- els than like country lyrics. “Girl with mal,” one of her best rock songs to date. the parking-lot eyes, Margaret is the It’s almost certainly about sex, and if it’s fragments of a name. Her bravery is not it’s certainly about something that mistaken for the thrashing in the lake of has to happen soon. the make-believe monster whose pic- When Case returns to her comfort ture was faked” are several lines from the zone—mid-tempo to slow—the music languorous and stately “Margaret vs. has a different feel, slightly wilder and Pauline,” a song I hear as a description heavier than before. “Prison Girls” could of the sisters from Marilynne Robin- be a story about the assassin Anton son’s “Housekeeping.” “Fox Confessor” Chigurh, from Cormac McCarthy’s was a relatively big success for an inde- “No Country for Old Men”: “Who pendent act, selling around two hun- am I tonight? My hotel room won’t dred thousand copies in this country. (It remember me.” Or maybe this singer does not hurt that Case tours constantly. has been captured: “The prison girls are “Touring is the greatest thing in the not impressed, the ones who have to world,” she told me.) The mood of the clean this mess. They’ve traded more for album is intense but cool—a long, med- cigarettes than I have managed to ex- itative, slightly bumpy hum. press.” When Case and her band join for a group chant of “oh, oh, oh,” there “ iddle Cyclone” may be the place is more than a hint of the chain gang Case has been driving to. Work- amid all the reverb. But this outlaw ingM with the New Pornographers has doesn’t return to guilt, or vengeance; the clearly affected her pacing, which has song’s recurrent phrase is “I love your picked up. There’s nothing as straight- long shadows and your gunpowder ahead as, say, the punk-rock “Loretta,” eyes.” And since we’re switching among but Case has moved out of the Nashville the human, animal, and physical worlds, ballroom. Another difference between it seems fair to say that shadows in this and her previous records is that she “Middle Cyclone” remain even when has a steady, full-time band now, and the light moves.  they woodshed the tunes before record- ing them. Case arranged the songs with newyorker.com the guitarist Paul Rigby, a trained jazz musician who, as she put it, “is really Sasha Frere-Jones’s pop-music blog.

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