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photo
by Victoria Renard |
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| Date |
City |
Venue |
Details |
| Wed 8/27/08 |
Reno, NV |
Robert Z. Hawkins Amphitheater |
# |
| Sat 8/30/08 |
Seattle, WA |
Bumbershoot Festival |
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| Sun 9/14/08 |
Morrison, CO |
Monolith Festival |
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| Sun 9/28/08 |
Austin, TX |
Austin City Limits Festival |
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| # Crooked Fingers supporting |
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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: Case's
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 Case's energies have been devoted to a thriving solo career.
Following three critically lauded studio albums, 1997's The
Virginian, 2000's Furnace Room Lullaby, and 2002's masterful
Blacklisted; a quietly potent kitchen-recorded EP, Canadian
Amp; and last year's 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. Case's
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 Neko's 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"). It's 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 Toronto's Horseshoe Tavern) and "At
Last" (tracked at Toronto's Iguana studio), the balance
of the album was done at Tucson, Arizona's 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, Calexico's
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 she'd 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 aren't kidding. And they sing about religion
with more passion than anybody sings about anything--not about
love or sex or violence or anything. It's 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 must've 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 album's opening track "Margaret vs. Pauline":
Ancient strings set feet a'light 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
Everything's 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 author's 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. She's 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 1997's 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 can't
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 isn't readily seen also
carries its own weight—an 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 that's confessional, poignant,
and, ultimately, an honest representation of where she is today.
For all the directness and immediacy of Fox Confessor, the music
on Neko's new album is thicker, deeper, and more detailed than
anything she's done before. Finally, it's neither the singer
nor the song alone that defines the best music. It's how much
power moves between the two. On Fox Confessor Brings the Flood,
Neko Case comes on strong. |
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Fox
Confessor Brings The Flood
Anti- Records
2006 |
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