A storm in the form of a girl
Neko Case
Middle Cyclone
(Anti)
38-year-old Virginian Neko Case takes classic Americana trappings – the big sky and the wide open road, the hanging traffic lamps and neon diners – and infuses them with a wayward country soul that could only have been forged from blank generation disillusion. She sings songs of western ennui and dislocation (“I’ve lost my taste for home/And that’s a dirty fallow feeling”), a sense of being adrift in a country of infinite possibility but also infinite peril.
If Ms Case is hell to be in love with, you might recover from the affair bearing a song like ‘This Tornado Loves You’ as a trophy. “The next time you say forever/I’ll punch you in your face,” she sings, “Just because you don’t believe it/Doesn’t mean I didn’t mean it.”
Mind you, she mostly eschews first person confessional for a born storyteller’s ability to slip her own skin and assume the mantle of the other, skewing traditional notions of role-play and point of view. Words tumble like tresses all over the textures of the title track and ‘Polar Nettles’, songs pitched halfway between the bordello and the infirmary, and peppered with scattershot images (“The Sistine Chapel painted with a Gatlin gun”).
The sound of Middle Cyclone – Case’s fifth studio album discounting collaborations with The New Pornographers and The Corn Sisters – is crisp but never clinical: motoring rhythm tracks, chiming f-hole guitars, that winsome cowgirl voice, skittering brushes and twangy telecasters… the landscape’s familiar, but the unorthodox song structures are beautifully disorientating, like turning the lights out in a familiar room where the furniture’s been rearranged. So much so that when she covers Sparks (‘Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth’) and Harry Nilsson (‘Don’t Forget Me’), she makes the work of masters sound almost rudimentary.
This tornado loves you. Return the favour.