After an eight year absence Neko Case returns with a richly textured album.
In the wake of her harrowing and well reviewed book “The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You: A Memoir” Neko Case delivers her first album since 2018’s “Hell-On”. In the interim Case has weathered a lot of storms. As she was recording that last album her farmhouse burned down and then, just as she was rebuilding, Covid hit. The lockdown allowed her time to write her memoir (a book which describes her parents abandoning her and her mother faking her own death among other things) but just as things were getting back to normal and Case got back to recording she was assailed by news of the deaths of several friends and inspirations including that of Dallas Good of The Sadies, a close friend and collaborator.
Several of the songs on this impressive album allude to those losses. Good himself is saluted on the closing track while another close companion, Dexter Romweber of the Flat Duo Jets is commemorated on the lead single, ‘Winchester Mansion of Sound’, a sparkling baroque styled song suffused with memories of Romweber, their friendship a “psychic river” dedicated to the ideal that music is forever. Adding to the poignancy is Case’s admission that she had based the song on the melody and construction of Robbie Basho’s ‘Orphan’s Lament’, a number she describes as “the saddest song ever.”
Recorded in a live setting with the PlainSong Chamber Orchestra appearing on several of the songs, this is a richly textured album which is not afraid to go in various directions as it plays. The opening song ‘Destination’ is quite sumptuous with Case’s distinctive voice ringing out over a string arrangement and a powerful driving rhythm, while the following ‘Tomboy Gold’ is almost a jazz-like tone poem. ‘Wreck’ is a more conventional song swept along by flurries of strings while the title song throws in everything but the kitchen sink as it pile drives along with a sense of fury. There are songs about nature and its wild inhabitants as on ‘Baby I’m not A Werewolf’ (with its mentions of minotaurs and labyrinths) and the intriguing dark folk of ‘Little Gears’ which is based on her observation of a spider spinning its web as Case admires the simplicity of it all and wondering why we humans need to feel “so above it all” in comparison to our fellow creatures.
The addition of the 20 piece Plainsong Orchestra to the dark instrumentation on the album is perhaps best realised on the closing song, ‘Match-Lit’ which is Case’s tribute to Dallas Good. It opens with the strings falling into an abyss before the band creep in (driven by a metronomic tick which persists throughout the song) It’s quite divine, akin to the best of Joni Mitchell’s most sophisticated recordings. The orchestra’s strings also adorn a song which perhaps sets out Case’s current philosophy when she sings, on ‘Rusty Mountain’, that “love songs mostly sound all the same, exercises in futility.” “Neon Grey Midnight Green” is not an album of love songs and is unlikely to hit the airwaves but it’s a hugely impressive listen which deserves a deep immersion and repeated plays in order to savour the richness therein.
