To kick off her latest memoir, The Tougher I Battle the Extra I Love You, Neko Case steps into the footwear of her youthful self, about to carry out a dive bar gig that, so far as her nerves are involved, would possibly as effectively be the Tremendous Bowl halftime present. “My job at that second is to conjure a small mud satan of unreality round us, to drag it up out of a sticky, shiny carpet and flappy, beer-soaked speaker cones,” she writes. “I’ve to make it out of phrases and sounds and appears.”
So has been her ethos for the previous three a long time. At this level it feels flawed to name Case a rustic artist when her work most intently resembles a feral pressure of baroque pop—Nilsson at a truck cease, Kate Bush working with raccoons in addition to foxes. Her new album, Neon Gray Midnight Inexperienced, arriving proper on the heels of her ebook, is one thing of a profession retrospective, however it’s also the 55-year-old Case at her most speedy and daring. Her final foray into autobiographical songwriting plunged into darkness and excavated the muck; Neon Gray sprouts upwards, pushing a newfound surprise for all times’s mysteries up via the grass for all to see.
The album’s title, taken from the assembly of slate-colored clouds and conifer forests on the Pacific Northwest skyline, conjures up the acquainted sense of vengeance and foreboding discovered throughout Case’s different releases. However its overwhelming emotions are gratitude and awestruck revelation. “I’m a meteor shattering round you/And I’m sorry/I’ve develop into a photo voltaic system/Since I discovered you,” she declares on lead single “Wreck.” Neon Gray was made in collaboration with the 20-piece PlainsSong Chamber Orchestra, performed by Sara Parkinson and organized by Tom Hagerman, and recorded dwell with the complete band. The result’s without delay all-encompassing and strikingly intimate. Up to now, Case’s crystalline voice stood alone in opposition to the foggy, widescreen neo-noir of songs like “Deep Purple Bells” and “Curse of the I-5 Hall.” Amid all of the strings and woodwinds and harps, bolstered by the same old guitars and brush-tapped drums, her heartfelt lyricism manifests as one huge floodlight, daring you to gaze straight-on.
Case has spoken about dropping a number of shut associates and colleagues within the years since 2018’s Hell-On, together with longtime collaborator Peter Moore and Dexter Romweber of Flat Duo Jets, her favourite band. The latter impressed the gorgeous “Winchester Mansion of Sound,” retelling a day spent collectively strolling alongside prepare tracks. Case’s emotion for him is uncooked and effusive, till she snaps again to the current to steer her viewers away from cliché: “When you assume I’m talkin’ ’bout romance/You’re not listening.” She backtracks over herself in these asides and run-ons and revisions, together with within the music itself, which often adjustments tempo partway via a music to match the cadence of Case’s recollections. The idea of time, by way of tidal waves or ticking clocks or a spider constructing its internet, reappears throughout the album like an pressing spectre. That’s the double-edged sword of grief—debilitating as it could be, it will possibly drive an individual towards a extra fervent truth-telling, a necessity to put out precisely who or what was misplaced and make sure it isn’t forgotten. If Hell-On was Case’s plea to heed the warnings of nature and the altering planet, Neon Gray is a grand eulogy for lives she’s already mentioned goodbye to, together with variations of her personal.
