The song that always slays me is Deep Red Bells. To this day, if anyone asks what is so arresting about the music of Neko Case, that's the first tune I direct them to.
The guitars ring and swirl, owing equally to country and psychedelia, with a touch of Twin Peaks-style twang. It could be The Cure or The Byrds at work, if you didn't know better.
Then we have the imagery — the reference to the Valley of the Shadow and the bells that beckon you. Ask not for whom the deep red bells toll, eh?
But all of that pales once the voice enters. Case's singing rings out as if it was recorded on a mid-autumn evening — a time when there's just enough chill in the air to silence the crickets so her vocals can wail for miles. But when the tune briefly jumps into country mode for its last verse (the one that suggests casting your soul about "like an old paper bag past empty lots and early graves"), the mood becomes all the more wondrous. The twinge of reverb on the chorus serves as icing.
Deep Red Bells, from 2002, was the sign that Case's music was becoming less agreeable to categorization as it grew more popular. The evolution was already occurring when Case made her Lexington debut, at an October 2000 concert at Lynagh's Music Club behind her album from that year, Furnace Room Lullaby. Many people at the time made her out to be the new chanteuse of the alt-country movement. But the singer would have none of that.
"I don't want to be ghetto ized by some term like 'alternative country,'" Case told me before that performance. "I've listened to country music growing up, and that's the music I want to play. I don't feel I have to justify it by saying it's 'alternative' or anything else."
In terms of artistic progression, of course, Deep Red Bells is ancient history for Case, who returns to Lexington on Monday for a sold-out taping of WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour. The song was recorded for her 2002 album Blacklisted, the third of her six albums but her last for the indie Chicago label Bloodshot.
By the time Case played The Dame in 2006 with the sublime Canadian neo- country stylists The Sadies, the blurring of stylistic boundaries was more than apparent. Her then-current solo album, 2004's live The Tigers Have Spoken, was a concert scrapbook of a record. The leadoff song, If You Knew, was another Case primer tune — with lyrics of jagged and restless romanticism, a richly complementary Sadies backdrop full of Byrds-like guitar jangle, a soaring vocal lead seemingly propelled by a deep, nocturnal muse, and strong elements of vintage girl-group pop thanks to harmonies by Kelly Hogan (who will again accompany Case at WoodSongs) and Carolyn Mark.
The rest of the album merrily shot all over the map, from covers of tunes written or popularized by Loretta Lynn (a commanding pedal-steel hullabaloo version of Rated X), The Shangri Las (a tambourine-shaking, twang-fortified The Train From Kansas City), Buffy Sainte-Marie (a harmony-happy reading of Soulful Shade of Blue) to an update of Blacklisted's title tune that sounds like a night train bound for bedlam.
"I'm sure there are a million common threads Buffy Sainte-Marie and Loretta Lynn share," Case said before the concert at The Dame. "As far as why we chose these particular tunes ... well, we don't completely know the answer to that. We like them in a way fans like them. It's not an intellectual process."
All of which set the stage for Middle Cyclone, the album that became a certifiable hit for Case in March. It shot to No. 3 on the Billboard Top 200, outscored only by U2 and Taylor Swift.
There is a vicious streak to some of the songs on Cyclone. Some is ripe with retribution, as in People Got a Lotta Nerve, in which man's exploitation of animals literally bites him back. "I'm a man-, man-, man-, man-, man-, man-eater," Case sings in chantlike glee as though she is one of the imprisoned killer whales and elephants in the song. "But still you're surprised, -prised, -prised, when I eat ya."
Storm, cyclone and tornado imagery pervades the rest of the album, upping the level of restlessness established on her early records. But again, the jangly pop sound and that positively royal voice disarm the tune's initial sting.
"Putting her big torchy voice behind larger-than-life imagery, she's fearless through every transformation, merging herself with storms," New York Times critic Jon Pareles wrote in March of Middle Cyclone. "She's as dangerous as she is devoted."
True to that form, Case appears to be very much the warrior on the cover of Middle Cyclone: She sits atop the roof of her 1968 Mercury Cougar brandishing a rapier.
"I don't like getting my picture taken," Case told Time Out New York before a spring performance at the Nokia Theater. "I thought, if I was an 8-year-old boy, what would I want to see on the cover of my record? If I was an 8-year-old boy, I'd want me to have a sword."
