Neko Case: Middle Cyclone A

Neko Case (The New Pornographers, for those unfamiliar) has a voice like a pipe organ, grandiose, thick, and swelling. And, like a pipe organ, it’s in the lower octaves that she’s at her best—where her voice pummels and surrounds you, smashing you like locomotion. If she’s had any fault in the past it’s that her voice was too big for the songs she was writing, or, maybe she hadn’t learned that sometimes just because you can belt a song doesn’t mean you should. Whichever, on her newest album Middle Cyclone she’s penned 14 songs that match her booming alto perfectly. In so doing, she often sounds like nothing so much as a re-imagined Decemberist, with richly layered acoustic strings and emotions writ large.

The album kicks off with This Tornado Needs You in which Case compares herself in love to a tornado destroying everything in its path. Her need to destroy and break those she loves is as the unifying theme of this album. It also introduces nature as a metaphor for romance, a theme she continues to explore. The cumulative message is that love is both fleeting and destructive by nature. The implication that Neko isn’t interested in challenging nature also serves as a warning to any male tempted to come to close, a point driven home when she bellows “I’m a man man man man man man man eater, but still you’re surprised when I eat ya.” And belied by the title of standout, “Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth.” The album kicks it up halfway through fourth song “Polar Nettles,” which includes the description “The Sistine Chapel painted with a Gatling gun,” and never looks back. The songs come quick (eight of the fourteen are quicker than three minutes) and many have several movements. The lyrics fit this pattern. Case is more interested in turning the perfect phrase than making linear sense. But the richness of these phrases are startling, catching like a fish hooks.

The closest Neko comes to regretting the life she’s chosen is on the heartbreaking Don’t Forget Me, in which she both cares for and warns her paramour. “Keep your memories, but keep you powder dry too.” And later, “I’ll miss you when I’m lonely. I’ll miss the alimony too.” She seems to see the inevitable ending of her chosen life, while choosing to ignore it, “And when we’re older, and full of cancer—oh it doesn’t matter now. Come on get happy!” Still, she pleads, “Don’t forget me. Please, don’t forget me. I think of you. Let me know you think of me too.”

Neko Case has traditionally been labeled alt country, but there’s not much country on this album. What it is, outside of the best album I’ve heard thus far this year, is hard to say. Roots n’ Rock, probably.
Download: Magpie to the Morning, I’m an Animal, Don’t Forget Me, The Pharoahs, and Polar Nettles

*Fun fact about Case: She’s been banned for life from performing at the Grande Ol’ Opry for taking of her shirt and performing a set topless. She claimed she just got hot. True story.