Neko Case Releases New Album Full of Extraordinary Transformations
owards the end, as she sings about putting a chicken in a guillotine named “the Don” and describes the experience as “pretty dope.” It’s a wry reference to her earlier years, when she was raised in an off-grid farming commune in the wilderness of British Columbia and they really did eat meat that way.
That intersection of dark humor, skepticism, and authenticity has always been core to Case’s appeal, along with her extraordinary voice. Neon Grey Midnight Green doesn’t veer into comedy; it’s not that kind of transformation. Still, it’s an album strategically devoid of any typical anthems or grand gestures. Instead, it absorbs attention and reflection—something it’s had plenty of time to do in the seven years since her previous album. That release, 2018’s Hell-On, was an account of her tumultuous personal history shaken up by a house fire that was as much a psychological tale as a literal one. (She’s alluded to its impact in keeping her studio, as well as its archive of her singer-songwriter peers’ work, completely separate from her living space in the basement of her house, where she lives alone with her five dogs.)
With Neon Grey Midnight Green, she goes further, willing to be as unsteady and as revealingly candid as she’s ever been. In the opening track, “Burnin’ Photographs,” she sings, “I’ll delight all my parts without a witness/ Just set them on fire,” suggesting a flame-cleansing purge of her past, like a new version of those old incendiary photo shoots in analog photography studios.
But the album doesn’t stay in that solitary, or self-punishing, mode for long, turning into her shrewdest, sweetest music in years—a dialed-down and unpretentious, slightly spacious, and delicately produced companion to her wholly unplugged Truckdriver, Gladiator, Mule. Case has been road-testing several of these songs for years, and they held up to anticipate in-concert renditions. There’s less of the wilderness ranger side of her—though it peaks through, alongside some lines patently drawing on the calamities of recent times—but the overall sensibility is one of life in the veins and friendship, often in troubled times, as in “City Swans,” “White Noise White Heat,” “Little Duck,” and “Thyme,” as opposed to some lofty introspection.
It’s an album of assurance, grown by someone who’s always been a bit elusive, yet who’s had fans and friends following her with affection, much as she has her dog train.