(Photo of Neko Case from The Kansas City Star photo archive.)
Straight Outta Geekville is an occasional post by The Star's Books Editor, John Mark Eberhart.
Oh, for the old days, when all I had to do to find new music was flip through Rolling Stone magazine or turn on the radio. Unfortunately, I'm an Old Geek now, and marketers don't care about me. Boo friggin' hoo.
So I found out about my newest musical flame, Neko Case, when I saw her on the cover of a mag called The Fretboard Journal. Obscure? Let's just say this publication doesn't enjoy the circulation of a Rolling Stone.
Well, I don't care at this point how I found out about her. All I know is I can't seem to yank Case's latest disc out of my car CD player.
Case performing "Maybe Sparrow" on CBS' "The Late Show."
It's my considered opinion, after dozens if not a hundred or more listens by now, that "Fox Confessor Brings the Flood" is the greatest pop album of the decade so far.
Reasons: We must start with her voice. It's an amazing instrument, richly resonant but also very well-trained; this is a woman who started with a God-given talent and, by God, made it even stronger with her hard work. If Case's falsetto leap near the end of the title track doesn't make your arm hair stand up, you probably are a) tone deaf or b) experiencing some kind of nerve damage at the present time.
Reason 2: Her guitar playing. Case, as she observed in the Fretboard article, has very small hands. No matter; her discovery of the four-string tenor guitar has given her an instrument far more suited to her physicality than the standard 6-string models. She wisely hired several good guitarists to play on this disc with her, but now that she owns several tenor axes that fit her mitts, she can chord with the best of them.
Reason 3, and the most important: Her songwriting. My full-time gig here at the paper is that of books editor, so I tend to be fairly picky about song lyrics. Case has been compared in the music press to a poet, but I think she's closer to a short-story writer. The opening track on "Fox Confessor" is called "Margaret vs. Pauline," and it's a helluva yarn about two girls, one fortunate and the other not so. Understated but poignant, this could be almost be a Flannery O'Connor piece.
Voice, guitar, songwriting: It all adds up to one powerful artist. The best of Case's work feels timeless, and I mean that almost literally - that it's timeLESS, that the passage of seconds and minutes seems almost not to apply. Think of the Band's early, great works such as "Music >From Big Pink," which can sound almost like a document of the Civil War rather than the 1960s. Case reminds me of that element of the Band (and she wisely went out and got Garth Hudson to play keys on some of "Fox Confessor," so she's obviously a fan). Listen to "A Widow's Toast" or "Maybe Sparrow" or, really, almost any of the dozen songs on this disc. They practically well up with a kind of Americana that seems to embrace the nation's entire history yet cannot be firmly tied to any one age.
One odd thing about all this is that I don't think Case's previous efforts - even fine discs such as "Blacklisted" or "The Tigers Have Spoken" - really even hinted at what she's achieved with "Fox Confessor Brings the Flood." The new album feels like not just a single leap but rather a few bounds.
It came out last March, by the way, so we're coming up on a year of time with it. I find that hard to believe, and I'm almost hoping it will start to lose just a trace of charm for me. Otherwise, I may not hear any new music at all in 2007. Thanks, Neko Case; thanks a lot for taking my CD player hostage. Now go buy yourself another tenor guitar.
I like this disc, but Neko's pinnacle, for me, is "I Wish I Was the Moon" from Blacklisted.
Posted by: renton | January 09, 2007 at 06:18 AM