Albums : Neko Case : The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You
Albums : Neko Case : The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You
Listen To Neko Case : The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You
Who is Neko Case?
When it comes to the art of telling tales, Jim Thompson had it pegged. There are 32 ways to write a story, the noir author famously observed, but only one plot: Things are not as they seem. The story of Neko Case, similarly, could be told a number of different ways; but the facts, as always, yield only a part of the truth.
There is the basic, by now familiar biographical arc: Cases childhood in Washington State, art school in Vancouver, her early baptism into the world of country and gospel music, and contemporary gigs in distaff punk trios Maow and Cub, as well as a longer (and ongoing) stint in powerhouse Canadian pop group the New Pornographers. Since the late 90s, however, the bulk of Cases energies have been devoted to a thriving solo career. Following three critically lauded studio albums, 1997s The Virginian, 2000s Furnace Room Lullaby, and 2002s masterful Blacklisted; a quietly potent kitchen-recorded EP, Canadian Amp; and last years brilliantly conceived concert collection The Tigers Have Spoken, Case reemerges with her latest, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood.
Two years in the making from conception to completion, the album is a culmination of sorts, the sound of an artist fully coming into her own and producing a career defining statement. Cases work has always hinted at a uniquely skewed gyroscope at the center of the music: her songs at once playful and heartfelt, artsy yet unpretentious, and capable of shelving offbeat imagery inside of classic compositional structures. Significantly, Fox Confessor is further fueled by Nekos refusal to limit her work along generic boundaries. Her role as producer is profoundly felt, as styles, influences and sonic signatures from dozens of musical traditions thread through the new songs, leaving the echo of their passing but combine to create a sound at once foreign and familiar.
Lyrically reflective and self-assessing, the twelve songs on the Fox Confessor are cast in a tone that is at once resigned (Hold On, Hold On) yet far from pessimistic (Maybe Sparrow). Its an album where the storytelling offers exacting portraits of the transient and hyper real (Margaret Vs. Pauline, Star Witness, That Teenage Feeling), while opening windows to the still viable--albeit sadly neglected these days--metaphors, lessons, or cautionary reflections derived through mythological creations (Fox Confessor Brings The Flood). Elsewhere, near-forgotten spirituals (John Saw That Number) emote clear-eyed observations on our common lives.
Aside from the intro to John Saw That Number (recorded in the back stairwell of Torontos Horseshoe Tavern) and At Last (tracked at Torontos Iguana studio), the balance of the album was done at Tucson, Arizonas Wavelab Studio, with engineers Craig Schumacher and Chris Schultz. Produced and mixed by Neko and Darryl Neudorf, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood once again finds her imagistic lyrics and singular voice backed by a cadre of talented collaborators including longtime bandmates Jon Rauhouse and Tom V. Ray, frequent musical foils The Sadies, Giant Sand leader Howe Gelb, vocalist Kelly Hogan, Calexicos Joey Burns and John Convertino, as well as Canadian cohorts Brian Connelly and Paul Rigby. Former Flat Duo Jet Dexter Romweber and Rachel Flotard of Seattle punk-pop combo Visqueen also guest, as does legendary piano/keyboard/accordion genius Garth Hudson of the Band.
However, if Neko has always chosen the best of collaborative friends, what she reveals on the new album is that the most tender place in my heart is for strangers--a statement which may or may not have seeds planted in the transient nowhere-is-home years of her childhood.
Having been moved from town to town after arriving in the world toward the end of 1970, she eventually settled in Tacoma, Washington. An only child, by the age of 15 shed left home and quit school. Neko somehow managed to survive on her own, and soon steeped herself in the re-emerging punk scene that roamed wildly between Olympia and Seattle, working at a series of rock clubs and witnessing firsthand the transformative power of bands like the Screaming Trees, Girl Trouble, and Nirvana.
Although she maintains an affinity for punk music and its off-shoots (having begun her musical career as a drummer for The Del-Logs, The Propanes, and Maow), it was the discovery of an obscure spiritual album by Bessie Griffin & Her Gospel Pearls that provided an important paradigm shift for her early on.
"I was 19," she once explained to an interviewer. "I was heavily into punk rock, and punk rock was really dogmatic and macho. But this record made me feel like, you know what, these people are singing about something they really care about. These ladies arent kidding. And they sing about religion with more passion than anybody sings about anything--not about love or sex or violence or anything. Its like their voices are these crazy cannons or something, and they could just blow shit out of their way with them. I wanted to be able to sing like that, because I thought that mustve felt really good."
As it happened, that kind of vibrant voice lurked inside her own body--seemingly born of another era, much older and lived-in than what someone in her thirties should now possess, unleashed at equal turns raucous and otherworldly. Much, of course, has been made of her unique vocal talents, as well as the musical strength of her recordings. Yet it is her lyrical prowess that begs for greater analysis, for her ability to shape verse is on par with everything else that makes her albums so dynamic--her other voice, as it were.
Indeed, the poetics on Fox Confessor Brings The Flood quite often transcend the secondary aspect of contemporary song lyrics, yielding finely detailed macro-observations while maintaining empathy for individuals who may be imperfect, or foolish, but are never to be trivialized. Take, for example, these few lines from the albums opening track Margaret vs. Pauline:
"Ancient strings set feet alight to speed to her such mild grace No monument of tacky gold They smoothed her hair with cinnamon waves And they placed an ingot in her breast to burn cool and collected Fate holds her firm in its cradle and rolls her for a tender Pause to savor Everythings so easy for Pauline..."
W.H. Auden once argued that the standard for recognizing a major poet should be established by the following points: 1. A large body of work; 2. A wide range of subject matter and treatment; 3. An unmistakable originality of vision and style; 4. A mastery of technique; 5. A constant, progressive process of maturation--so that should an authors individual works be placed side by side at any stage of his or her career, it would always be clear which work came first and which came after. As such, his criteria can also be used on the songwriters of our day--the poets of the modern age--although, as Auden himself conceded, only three and a half of the five points really needed to apply.
Regardless, Neko is a major poet by any standard, a songwriter less interested perhaps in traditional narrative form than in distilling a pure moment of time. Shes an artist whose songs are so textured in their presentation that the subtleties filter into the subconscious while the overall effect astonishes. But rather than each of her progressive albums disposing of what came before it, there is, instead, a sense of continuation at play--in which every album exists like the subsequent chapter to a novel that grows more complicated and intriguing as it progresses.
So, then, if her 1997s country-flavored debut The Virginian stands as a welcoming prologue, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood takes us much deeper into the story where, as she writes and sings in Dirty Knife, cascading letters pool on the stairs/the grass is high, the cats are wild/you cant even touch the tip of their tails/and the blood runs crazy with giant strides.
The continued evolution of her as a creator, producer, personality and live performer has been as fascinating to witness as the music she makes. With Blacklisted, her 2002 masterpiece and an album that deserved every bit of its widespread praise, came validation, too, for those serious music lovers and insightful fans who already knew the synthetic label of alt-country would fail to pigeonhole her work or vision.
Neko claims no genre, nor utilizes any classic formula for her songs and singing. More than anything she thrives in the spaces in between her music. As with the highest art, the negative space should be calculated, too. What isnt readily seen also carries its own weightan articulated emptiness, a space defined and made human by whatever has sought to confine it; and while her artistic integrity may never have been in doubt, on Fox Confessor Brings The Flood Neko has again shown how capable she is of accessing her best instincts to forge something meaningful with words and sounds--a record thats confessional, poignant, and, ultimately, an honest representation of where she is today.
For all the directness and immediacy of Fox Confessor, the music on Nekos new album is thicker, deeper, and more detailed than anything shes done before. Finally, its neither the singer nor the song alone that defines the best music. Its how much power moves between the two. On Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, Neko Case comes on strong.
The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You Review
When Neko Case put out the excellent Fox Confessor Brings the Flood back in 2006, it was a logical endpoint of the gothic country sound she’d been using since the start of her solo career. That album was evocative, creepy and unsettling in all the right ways, with Case’s smoky, melodic voice keeping everything anchored and tuneful no matter how dark and weird the music got. 2009’s Middle Cyclone found Case opening up her sound a bit. Songs such as “This Tornado Loves You” and “People Got a Lotta Nerve” brought in rock and pop influences that finally seemed to reflect the decade she’d spent recording and touring with power-pop heroes the New Pornographers. But the album wasn’t a wholesale change, as many of the tracks, particularly “Prison Girls”, ended up sounding as dark, gothic and country as anything Case had ever done.
Case’s latest album, with the long but interesting title The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You, makes Middle Cyclone seem, in retrospect, like a transitional record. The Worse Things Get features some of the most upbeat and rocking songs that Case has ever done under her own name. But it also manages to weave in all the elements that are hallmarks of Case’s albums. There are still the idiosyncratic lyrics involving animals and/or animal-like behavior, dashes of classic country and above all, Case’s always-gorgeous singing.
The album starts with a pair of strong songs, “Wild Creatures” and “Night Still Comes”. The former is a mid-tempo, minor-key country-rock track that opens with the lines “When you catch a light / You look like your mother,” followed closely by “When you catch a light / There’s a flash of wild creature.” Just like that, the listener is back in Case’s peculiar but fascinating world, where the stories always have a particular viewpoint and the music doesn’t do what you’d expect. In this case, the chorus hits right at the midpoint of the song, followed by a lush piano solo and a chorus repetition. And then the song just ends. “Night Still Comes” opens as a slow-paced torch song waltz, but zags at the chorus, when the music opens into a widescreen singalong, complete with echoing harmony vocals. Fellow New Pornographer A.C. Newman’s voice is clearly audible in those harmonies along with Case’s longtime compatriot Kelly Hogan.
The openers are essentially par for the course on a Neko Case record, but third track and first single “Man” is all sardonic, confrontational lyrics and furious power-pop. Over galloping drums and chiming guitars courtesy of M. Ward, Case declares that “I’m a man / That’s what you raised me to be / I’m not an identity crisis / This was planned.” Adding to the aggression, the song is periodically punctuated by short bursts of heavily distorted guitar noise and Ward throws in three short guitar solos that each use completely different tones. As a statement against pigeonholing, it’s incredibly strong, and it helps that the song is also hugely fun. Hearing Case sing “I am the man in the fucking moon / ‘Cause you didn’t know you didn’t know what a man was / Until I showed you” is just awesome.
Case doesn’t try to replicate that ferocity elsewhere on the album, but she finds another outlet for rage and sympathy on the bracing “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu”. Essentially the song is one of those anecdotes about terrible people you see while driving or at the airport, but put into a scathing indictment. Case tells the story of waiting at a bus stop in Honolulu when she saw a mother shout at her daughter “Get the fuck away from me! / Why don’t you ever shut up!” in the starkest terms possible, with just her voice and well-placed harmony. The rest of the song finds Case essentially recording the incident for posterity, saying “One day, when you ask yourself / Did it really happen? / You won’t believe it / But yes it did,” while also declaring that the mother did not love the daughter.
The deceptively upbeat-sounding “Bracing for Sunday” is about small-town people who party hard on Friday and have to face church on Sunday. It also contains this rueful gem, delivered matter of factly: “I only ever had one love / Her name was Mary Anne / She died having a child by her brother / He died because I murdered him.” “City Swans” is also bright and upbeat, so much so that it could easily slot into a New Pornographers record were it not for the country-style guitar solo. The simple chorus “I can’t look at you straight on / You’re made from something different and I know” has a great melody and backbeat that makes it an instant singalong.
The Worse Things Get wraps up with a pair of interesting, different-sounding songs. “Where Did I Leave That Fire” begins with over a minute of what sounds like submarine sound effects, with various pings and plops. A bit of atonal piano and low, arco bass complete the unsettling sound of the song, until Case starts singing and brings it back to earth. A rumination on dying and the experience of leaving your body, the song concludes with a man telling Case that her fire has been found and that she “Can pick it up if you come down with ID.” “Ragtime” finishes the record with a horn-laden groove that begins with Case musing that snow always falls sideways in cities and seems to come out of streetlights. As the song reaches its climax and outro, Case locks into the horn melody and sings along, repeating, “I am one and the same / I am peaceful and strange.”
One advantage of Case being “peaceful and strange” and generally unique is that she can release an album like this and most listeners won’t bat an eye. Only about half of The Worse Things Get really sounds like anything she’s done before under her own name. But she’s also been fronting a power-pop band for the entirety of the 21st century. With her strong lyrical point of view and even stronger voice, pretty much anything she writes and performs sounds like a Neko Case song. The Worse Things Get is another excellent album from Case on a resumé that’s full of excellent albums.
Contact Neko Case
Website | Twitter | Facebook | MySpace
Contact PopMatters
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Sources : Neko Case Photo | Listen To The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You | Neko Case Biography | The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You Review
Purchase : iTunes (Deluxe Edition) | iTunes | Amazon (Deluxe Edition) | Walmart
Listen To Neko Case : The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You
Who is Neko Case?
When it comes to the art of telling tales, Jim Thompson had it pegged. There are 32 ways to write a story, the noir author famously observed, but only one plot: Things are not as they seem. The story of Neko Case, similarly, could be told a number of different ways; but the facts, as always, yield only a part of the truth.
There is the basic, by now familiar biographical arc: Cases childhood in Washington State, art school in Vancouver, her early baptism into the world of country and gospel music, and contemporary gigs in distaff punk trios Maow and Cub, as well as a longer (and ongoing) stint in powerhouse Canadian pop group the New Pornographers. Since the late 90s, however, the bulk of Cases energies have been devoted to a thriving solo career. Following three critically lauded studio albums, 1997s The Virginian, 2000s Furnace Room Lullaby, and 2002s masterful Blacklisted; a quietly potent kitchen-recorded EP, Canadian Amp; and last years brilliantly conceived concert collection The Tigers Have Spoken, Case reemerges with her latest, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood.
Two years in the making from conception to completion, the album is a culmination of sorts, the sound of an artist fully coming into her own and producing a career defining statement. Cases work has always hinted at a uniquely skewed gyroscope at the center of the music: her songs at once playful and heartfelt, artsy yet unpretentious, and capable of shelving offbeat imagery inside of classic compositional structures. Significantly, Fox Confessor is further fueled by Nekos refusal to limit her work along generic boundaries. Her role as producer is profoundly felt, as styles, influences and sonic signatures from dozens of musical traditions thread through the new songs, leaving the echo of their passing but combine to create a sound at once foreign and familiar.
Lyrically reflective and self-assessing, the twelve songs on the Fox Confessor are cast in a tone that is at once resigned (Hold On, Hold On) yet far from pessimistic (Maybe Sparrow). Its an album where the storytelling offers exacting portraits of the transient and hyper real (Margaret Vs. Pauline, Star Witness, That Teenage Feeling), while opening windows to the still viable--albeit sadly neglected these days--metaphors, lessons, or cautionary reflections derived through mythological creations (Fox Confessor Brings The Flood). Elsewhere, near-forgotten spirituals (John Saw That Number) emote clear-eyed observations on our common lives.
Aside from the intro to John Saw That Number (recorded in the back stairwell of Torontos Horseshoe Tavern) and At Last (tracked at Torontos Iguana studio), the balance of the album was done at Tucson, Arizonas Wavelab Studio, with engineers Craig Schumacher and Chris Schultz. Produced and mixed by Neko and Darryl Neudorf, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood once again finds her imagistic lyrics and singular voice backed by a cadre of talented collaborators including longtime bandmates Jon Rauhouse and Tom V. Ray, frequent musical foils The Sadies, Giant Sand leader Howe Gelb, vocalist Kelly Hogan, Calexicos Joey Burns and John Convertino, as well as Canadian cohorts Brian Connelly and Paul Rigby. Former Flat Duo Jet Dexter Romweber and Rachel Flotard of Seattle punk-pop combo Visqueen also guest, as does legendary piano/keyboard/accordion genius Garth Hudson of the Band.
However, if Neko has always chosen the best of collaborative friends, what she reveals on the new album is that the most tender place in my heart is for strangers--a statement which may or may not have seeds planted in the transient nowhere-is-home years of her childhood.
Having been moved from town to town after arriving in the world toward the end of 1970, she eventually settled in Tacoma, Washington. An only child, by the age of 15 shed left home and quit school. Neko somehow managed to survive on her own, and soon steeped herself in the re-emerging punk scene that roamed wildly between Olympia and Seattle, working at a series of rock clubs and witnessing firsthand the transformative power of bands like the Screaming Trees, Girl Trouble, and Nirvana.
Although she maintains an affinity for punk music and its off-shoots (having begun her musical career as a drummer for The Del-Logs, The Propanes, and Maow), it was the discovery of an obscure spiritual album by Bessie Griffin & Her Gospel Pearls that provided an important paradigm shift for her early on.
"I was 19," she once explained to an interviewer. "I was heavily into punk rock, and punk rock was really dogmatic and macho. But this record made me feel like, you know what, these people are singing about something they really care about. These ladies arent kidding. And they sing about religion with more passion than anybody sings about anything--not about love or sex or violence or anything. Its like their voices are these crazy cannons or something, and they could just blow shit out of their way with them. I wanted to be able to sing like that, because I thought that mustve felt really good."
As it happened, that kind of vibrant voice lurked inside her own body--seemingly born of another era, much older and lived-in than what someone in her thirties should now possess, unleashed at equal turns raucous and otherworldly. Much, of course, has been made of her unique vocal talents, as well as the musical strength of her recordings. Yet it is her lyrical prowess that begs for greater analysis, for her ability to shape verse is on par with everything else that makes her albums so dynamic--her other voice, as it were.
Indeed, the poetics on Fox Confessor Brings The Flood quite often transcend the secondary aspect of contemporary song lyrics, yielding finely detailed macro-observations while maintaining empathy for individuals who may be imperfect, or foolish, but are never to be trivialized. Take, for example, these few lines from the albums opening track Margaret vs. Pauline:
"Ancient strings set feet alight to speed to her such mild grace No monument of tacky gold They smoothed her hair with cinnamon waves And they placed an ingot in her breast to burn cool and collected Fate holds her firm in its cradle and rolls her for a tender Pause to savor Everythings so easy for Pauline..."
W.H. Auden once argued that the standard for recognizing a major poet should be established by the following points: 1. A large body of work; 2. A wide range of subject matter and treatment; 3. An unmistakable originality of vision and style; 4. A mastery of technique; 5. A constant, progressive process of maturation--so that should an authors individual works be placed side by side at any stage of his or her career, it would always be clear which work came first and which came after. As such, his criteria can also be used on the songwriters of our day--the poets of the modern age--although, as Auden himself conceded, only three and a half of the five points really needed to apply.
Regardless, Neko is a major poet by any standard, a songwriter less interested perhaps in traditional narrative form than in distilling a pure moment of time. Shes an artist whose songs are so textured in their presentation that the subtleties filter into the subconscious while the overall effect astonishes. But rather than each of her progressive albums disposing of what came before it, there is, instead, a sense of continuation at play--in which every album exists like the subsequent chapter to a novel that grows more complicated and intriguing as it progresses.
So, then, if her 1997s country-flavored debut The Virginian stands as a welcoming prologue, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood takes us much deeper into the story where, as she writes and sings in Dirty Knife, cascading letters pool on the stairs/the grass is high, the cats are wild/you cant even touch the tip of their tails/and the blood runs crazy with giant strides.
The continued evolution of her as a creator, producer, personality and live performer has been as fascinating to witness as the music she makes. With Blacklisted, her 2002 masterpiece and an album that deserved every bit of its widespread praise, came validation, too, for those serious music lovers and insightful fans who already knew the synthetic label of alt-country would fail to pigeonhole her work or vision.
Neko claims no genre, nor utilizes any classic formula for her songs and singing. More than anything she thrives in the spaces in between her music. As with the highest art, the negative space should be calculated, too. What isnt readily seen also carries its own weightan articulated emptiness, a space defined and made human by whatever has sought to confine it; and while her artistic integrity may never have been in doubt, on Fox Confessor Brings The Flood Neko has again shown how capable she is of accessing her best instincts to forge something meaningful with words and sounds--a record thats confessional, poignant, and, ultimately, an honest representation of where she is today.
For all the directness and immediacy of Fox Confessor, the music on Nekos new album is thicker, deeper, and more detailed than anything shes done before. Finally, its neither the singer nor the song alone that defines the best music. Its how much power moves between the two. On Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, Neko Case comes on strong.
The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You Review
When Neko Case put out the excellent Fox Confessor Brings the Flood back in 2006, it was a logical endpoint of the gothic country sound she’d been using since the start of her solo career. That album was evocative, creepy and unsettling in all the right ways, with Case’s smoky, melodic voice keeping everything anchored and tuneful no matter how dark and weird the music got. 2009’s Middle Cyclone found Case opening up her sound a bit. Songs such as “This Tornado Loves You” and “People Got a Lotta Nerve” brought in rock and pop influences that finally seemed to reflect the decade she’d spent recording and touring with power-pop heroes the New Pornographers. But the album wasn’t a wholesale change, as many of the tracks, particularly “Prison Girls”, ended up sounding as dark, gothic and country as anything Case had ever done.
Case’s latest album, with the long but interesting title The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You, makes Middle Cyclone seem, in retrospect, like a transitional record. The Worse Things Get features some of the most upbeat and rocking songs that Case has ever done under her own name. But it also manages to weave in all the elements that are hallmarks of Case’s albums. There are still the idiosyncratic lyrics involving animals and/or animal-like behavior, dashes of classic country and above all, Case’s always-gorgeous singing.
The album starts with a pair of strong songs, “Wild Creatures” and “Night Still Comes”. The former is a mid-tempo, minor-key country-rock track that opens with the lines “When you catch a light / You look like your mother,” followed closely by “When you catch a light / There’s a flash of wild creature.” Just like that, the listener is back in Case’s peculiar but fascinating world, where the stories always have a particular viewpoint and the music doesn’t do what you’d expect. In this case, the chorus hits right at the midpoint of the song, followed by a lush piano solo and a chorus repetition. And then the song just ends. “Night Still Comes” opens as a slow-paced torch song waltz, but zags at the chorus, when the music opens into a widescreen singalong, complete with echoing harmony vocals. Fellow New Pornographer A.C. Newman’s voice is clearly audible in those harmonies along with Case’s longtime compatriot Kelly Hogan.
The openers are essentially par for the course on a Neko Case record, but third track and first single “Man” is all sardonic, confrontational lyrics and furious power-pop. Over galloping drums and chiming guitars courtesy of M. Ward, Case declares that “I’m a man / That’s what you raised me to be / I’m not an identity crisis / This was planned.” Adding to the aggression, the song is periodically punctuated by short bursts of heavily distorted guitar noise and Ward throws in three short guitar solos that each use completely different tones. As a statement against pigeonholing, it’s incredibly strong, and it helps that the song is also hugely fun. Hearing Case sing “I am the man in the fucking moon / ‘Cause you didn’t know you didn’t know what a man was / Until I showed you” is just awesome.
Case doesn’t try to replicate that ferocity elsewhere on the album, but she finds another outlet for rage and sympathy on the bracing “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu”. Essentially the song is one of those anecdotes about terrible people you see while driving or at the airport, but put into a scathing indictment. Case tells the story of waiting at a bus stop in Honolulu when she saw a mother shout at her daughter “Get the fuck away from me! / Why don’t you ever shut up!” in the starkest terms possible, with just her voice and well-placed harmony. The rest of the song finds Case essentially recording the incident for posterity, saying “One day, when you ask yourself / Did it really happen? / You won’t believe it / But yes it did,” while also declaring that the mother did not love the daughter.
The deceptively upbeat-sounding “Bracing for Sunday” is about small-town people who party hard on Friday and have to face church on Sunday. It also contains this rueful gem, delivered matter of factly: “I only ever had one love / Her name was Mary Anne / She died having a child by her brother / He died because I murdered him.” “City Swans” is also bright and upbeat, so much so that it could easily slot into a New Pornographers record were it not for the country-style guitar solo. The simple chorus “I can’t look at you straight on / You’re made from something different and I know” has a great melody and backbeat that makes it an instant singalong.
The Worse Things Get wraps up with a pair of interesting, different-sounding songs. “Where Did I Leave That Fire” begins with over a minute of what sounds like submarine sound effects, with various pings and plops. A bit of atonal piano and low, arco bass complete the unsettling sound of the song, until Case starts singing and brings it back to earth. A rumination on dying and the experience of leaving your body, the song concludes with a man telling Case that her fire has been found and that she “Can pick it up if you come down with ID.” “Ragtime” finishes the record with a horn-laden groove that begins with Case musing that snow always falls sideways in cities and seems to come out of streetlights. As the song reaches its climax and outro, Case locks into the horn melody and sings along, repeating, “I am one and the same / I am peaceful and strange.”
One advantage of Case being “peaceful and strange” and generally unique is that she can release an album like this and most listeners won’t bat an eye. Only about half of The Worse Things Get really sounds like anything she’s done before under her own name. But she’s also been fronting a power-pop band for the entirety of the 21st century. With her strong lyrical point of view and even stronger voice, pretty much anything she writes and performs sounds like a Neko Case song. The Worse Things Get is another excellent album from Case on a resumé that’s full of excellent albums.
Contact Neko Case
Website | Twitter | Facebook | MySpace
Contact PopMatters
Website | Twitter | Facebook | Kindle Edition | Email
Sources : Neko Case Photo | Listen To The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You | Neko Case Biography | The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You Review
Purchase : iTunes (Deluxe Edition) | iTunes | Amazon (Deluxe Edition) | Walmart
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