Mesocyclonica

So, every Neko Case album review begins with some remark about The Voice and this one is no different.

For those who have been following Ms. Case since she was banned from the Grand Ole Opry for taking off her shirt during a performance at the Ryman Theater in Nashville, this latest album will have little to surprise. Rather, she seems on a trajectory, moving further and further away from the alt-country siren she once was and toward the asymmetrical, overtly poetic singer songwriter she now clearly is.

The Voice, though, that always remains. She describes it as a firehose of sound, liquid and loud as all hell, but unwieldy for delicate singing. She sells herself considerably short. Middle Cyclone finds her reverb drenched vocals swooping and diving and pouring themselves over fifteen songs about - in the sense that they are about anything at all - natural disasters, animals, death, and her own insecurities. There are songs about tornadoes in love and murderous whales, songs about maneating and disappointment.

All are dark and melodic and perfect for three a.m. listening, but what continues to impress me is how she's managed to carve out a coherent world for herself and her music unlike anything else going. Songs sometimes barely flirt with two minutes in length that could easily have been expected to be four and half minute numbers in anyone else's catalog. Songs go for four minutes and then give you the chorus precisely once before ending at the four and a half minute mark. All the lyrics are slantwise and the tempo often not at all representative of the subject matter. In short, she's made herself over six or seven albums into an honest to goodness rock poet. And that would be enough to admire even without The Voice, but to be perfectly frank it is The Voice that keeps people coming back for more. It is The Voice that alchemizes it all into something potent and addictive - there simply isn't anything like it in popular music today. It is like Patsy Cline was trapped in the machine that created Dr. Manhattan.

Middle Cyclone isn't immediately as satisfying to me as was Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, and it doesn't do for me what Blacklisted still does for me, but it is a good deal more upbeat (at least musically) than either of those two albums. Check it out.

Oh, and this is still 2009's greatest album cover. They may as well hand out the award already.