Neko Case's Blacklisted
Here's one reason to love Neko Case: The photo on the cover of her outstanding new album, Blacklisted, finds her sprawled?two dirty feet and half a torso exposed?beneath the back bumper of a big brown van. It's pure Neko?funny, slyly sexy and slightly vexing. All of those qualities turn up in abundance on Blacklisted, a haunted beauty of a country album from the Virginia-born, redheaded chanteuse with a hillbilly heart and rock 'n' roll swagger.
Case turned up on record most recently as vocalist of the New Pornographers. The band's only record to date, 2000's Mass Romantic, is a scorching blend of punk and pop noise. With the Pornographers, Case is a badass girl rock star; she sings with a fury for the ages. Blacklisted is a long way from the New Pornos. With a handful of longtime sidemen and several new collaborators, Case continues her exploration of a brand of country music that is authentic and traditional?not the derivative, soulless Shania/DixieChicks/ Toby Keith bullshit that somehow falls into heavy rotation on country radio. Neko has recorded a pair of country records with players known as her Boyfriends, and another album of old-time Americana as half (with Carolyn Mark) of a duo known as the Corn Sisters. She's the real thing, not a test-marketed dilettante.
That much is clear on "Deep Red Bells." Written, like 11 of the record's 13 tracks, by Case, it possesses what might be the single best line of the year. Describing a handprint on a car door, Case says, "It looks a lot like engine oil and tastes like being poor and small." It's tough to know exactly what that means, but it's hard not to like the way she says it. "Tightly" is a beautiful little song about the new moon and the stars and the trees and Neko's freedom to "covet all I please." "Outro with Bees" is a gorgeous lament in which Case observes that "It's better my sweet that we hover like bees/ 'Cause there's no sure footing, no love I believe." "Lady Pilot" is about the pull of gravity and other, more inscrutable forces of the natural world. And the title track is a blues dirge of "cracklin' fires and quiet plains." If epic loneliness and emotional dislocation is your thing, this is your song.
There are also two fine cover songs on the record. With backing from Dallas Good's echoey guitar and Joey Burns' understated vibraphone, Neko imbues the Dee Sylvia/ Guy Wood-penned "Look for Me (I'll Be Around)" with smoky sexual tension. "When the new crowd starts to bore you," she sings in a voice that ought to have an NC-17 rating, "just remember there is someone to adore you." It is the album's sole departure from the country sound; she pulls it off so well that it's easy to imagine Neko in the role of mid-century film noir starlet?smart, sassy and more than a little wild. The 1964 standard "Runnin' Out of Fools," made popular by Aretha Franklin and later Elvis Costello, is fueled by Case's strongest vocal turn on the record. She sings the verses in a chatty, conversational patter and hammers home the chorus like she's got something to prove. She doesn't.