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Can’t wait for Neko’s latest. I think there’s no doubt she’s cut from the same cloth as Lucinda. A different approach and different generation, too, but the caliber of artistry is on par. I’ve seen ’em both live (Neko twice, early on; Lucinda 4 times) and listened to both for quite a while. I get the same chills/all-over-warm feelings from Neko that I get from Lucinda at her best. It’s real, uncontrived sounds for all the right reasons rendered in stunning voice. “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood” (her latest LP) is an absolute classic, so check it out — if you like Lucinda’s music and haven’t heard Neko Case, I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t like her records. I’m sure I’m preaching to the converted for most everyone else who has…..
Yeah there’s something about her voice that just slays me. Thank god she’s not too wrapped up in that New Pornographers to keep doing her best stuff. Wierd that she was on adult swim though.
Neko Case will release a new album, “Middle Cyclone,” March 3 on Anti-Records. Case’s first release since 2006’s “Fox Confessor Brings The Flood” features 12 Case-penned songs, in addition to covers of “Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth” by Sparks and “Don’t Forget Me” by Harry Nilsson. Case and her core band are joined by numerous guests on the release, including M. Ward, Garth Hudson, and Sarah Harmer, as well as members of The New Pornographers, Los Lobos, Calexico and Giant Sand, among others. (LiveDaily.com)
The NY Times Magazine article was a great read. Thanks for the link.
I have Middle Cyclone on pre-order and can’t wait for the release.
Neko, Lucinda and Patty Griffin are simply awesome in my opinion. I would recommend anything from each of them. You won’t be dissapointed. 🙂
“The next time you say ‘forever’ I will punch you in your face,” Neko Case vows on “Middle Cyclone,” an album filled with cataclysmic love songs. It’s Ms. Case’s sixth studio album on her own, in a career that also includes her on-and-off membership in the New Pornographers. In her latest songs nothing is constant: not romance, not life, not memory, not even the rhythm or the shape of a melody. Putting her big, torchy voice behind larger-than-life imagery, she’s fearless through every transformation, merging herself with storms — one song is titled “This Tornado Loves You” — and seeing herself in animals like a killer whale and a vulture. She’s as dangerous as she is devoted.
“I’m a man-man-man, man-man-man-eater,” she sings in the poppy refrain of “People Got a Lotta Nerve,” adding, “But still you’re surprised when I eat you.” The album’s most forthright song declares, “I’m an Animal,” with marchlike drums and ringing electric guitars as she insists, “My courage is roaring like the sound of the sun.”
On the surface Ms. Case’s songs qualify as alt-country or Americana. The production often harks back to 1960s and ’70s rock, backing her concise melody lines with finger-picked acoustic guitars or twang and reverb. But surreal, unexpected sounds — echoes, voices, noise — well up within those arrangements. Her version of Harry Nilsson’s whimsically fatalistic “Don’t Forget Me” becomes a lofty expanse of choral voices and multiple pianos.
Her own songs melt down structures. Instead of fixed verses or choruses there are two-chord patterns that run as long as Ms. Case wants, or as short; they might add or subtract a beat, suddenly switch chords or support an entirely new tune in mid-song. Subliminally that rhapsodic approach keeps the songs off balance and suspenseful, ready for every possibility of disaster or exaltation. JON PARELES, NY TIMES
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