The Worse Things Get,
The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You – Neko Case
To hear the voice of Neko Case on a finished and published new
recording is to blink a few times, rub eyes and ears as a hedge against
hallucination, and—finally—surrender to the anxious joy of another happy
miracle. She possesses the voice and
lyrical force of, if not a Prime Mover, certainly a first-order expelled angel,
and all indications are that she now navigates the gifted doom of one who must
wander the land in perpetual search of challenge, peer, or confidante. To capture such a thing in recorded form is akin
to proving a legend.
The requisite energy for such a career, or life, must be
daunting—and it spills over and across the margins (and title) of latest album The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight,
The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You.
The sprawling, gorgeous evidence suggests that Neko Case will
continue to wander for some time.
The Force of Nature stuff began a few albums ago, with era-defining
stunner Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
in 2006. Arriving four whole years after
Case’s previous studio album, and a year or so after Wilco and Radiohead seemed
to collide in the same white space of spare post-rock beauty, Fox Confessor was and has remained a Top
Three contender for the American Album of the Aughts. The song structures were highly atypical—to
the extent that they actually were
structures—the lyrics and recording technicals were captivating, and My God,
the singing. The outcome was
interesting, beautiful, and powerful: Neko
Case leapt from 2006 as something well beyond alt-country artist. She had become a tornado.
She evidently knew it, calling the next album “Middle
Cyclone,” and assuming form as an actual funnel cloud on shattering leadoff
track, “This Tornado Loves You.” If
there are issues of communication and understanding involved with adopting the persona
of a windstorm, the narrator of the track seemed to know it by the last few
moments, lamenting on the far side of a trail of destruction, “This tornado
loves you: what will make you believe
me?”
There are no punches pulled, therefore, in naming the first
track of this latest album “Wild Creatures.”
Neko Case has been one for a while now.
The track/album begins abruptly, with vocals accompanying the very first
musical notes; again, there is energy and force everywhere. And there are creatures, and the narrator,
though a bit coy about it, is one, too:
“As you fly alongside you’ll discover my weakness / I’m not fighting for
your freedom, I’m fighting to be wise.”
And in said scenario, who makes final judgments about being
wise? Within a few lines of the new
album, we have alighted upon the blighted reality of the peerless. The narrator offers the choice of being the
king’s pet, or the king:
I’d choose
odorless, and invisible,
But
otherwise I would choose the king,
Even though
it sounds the loneliest.
There follows quite the barrage of drum and guitar, which
post-decision sounds a bit like angry frustration. And then some absolutely haunted piano, and a
recitation of the same lines, only this time in the manner of a descending god.
The narrators of these songs are indisputably wise, and
perhaps more ominously, cleverer than they have been in previous Neko Case outings. Second track “Night Still Comes,” unfurls the
booming choral refrain, “You never held it at the right angle,” a short while
after the lines, “But now not even the masons know what drug will keep night
from coming,” and “there are so many tools that are made from my hands.” The “right angle” is a solid pun in its own
right; layered against the invoked background of a masonic square, sung at
Belt-It-Out Level, it becomes smile- and chill-inducing.
Outstanding wordplay and imagery aside, the take home
messages do not stray far from a fundamentally wild and lonely existence, and
perhaps one under presumed siege. Both
of the first two tracks note a fear of poisoning. And by the end of “Night Still Comes,” we get
to it, the self-preservation becoming self-immolation; the
suffocation-by-rarefied-air:
Swallowed waist-deep in the core of
the forest
Arboreal
feast, let it finish me please,
And I’ll
revenge myself all over myself,
There’s
nothing you can do to me.
It isn’t all asexual, pastoral forestry. Not nearly.
In successive songs (“Man” and “I’m From Nowhere”) the narrators
proclaim themselves (via the one of the great recent female voices in rock) “the
man in the fucking moon” and announce
surprise “when you called me a lady / ‘cause I’m still not so sure that that’s
what I want to be…I’ll gladly wear the pants into the next century.” Clearly for the purpose of navigating the
struggles of this album, a gender role becomes at times one construct and one
confine too many. Power and force is all.
Thankfully the album is not entirely loneliness and
struggle; there is succor offered in several ways. First, in the form of two glorious
mid-to-down-tempo approximations of pop songs, “Calling Cards” (again—Pun
Alert) and “City Swans,” located back-to-back as tracks 7 and 8. The structures of both songs are—of
course—not exactly standard-issue verse-chorus-verse-etc., but they are both
achingly pretty, and they are both about loving someone. They are sunbeams and warmth through the
brambles.
Also, there are more direct approaches to healing: the album’s two sparest arrangements “Nearly
Midnight, Honolulu” and “Afraid” are, in
turn, a missive of love for an abused child and an incantation of strength for
the overcome. The former pierces with
implied fury; the latter consoles with delicate empathy. Both songs, sung as though by angels, blur
the natural world of the album landscape into the supernatural above the
horizon.
The final shock of The
Worse Things Get… is this one: there
are no duds or missteps here. The toil
depicted in so many of these songs must surely be an arch temptation toward
indulgence; the switchback route an invitation to disorientation or
atonality. But everything here sounds so
very lovely; well-chosen instrumentation comes and goes with supreme elegance;
That Voice does not overreach, not even once.
Struggle does not frequently overlap with beauty. Struggle is not, generally, an
aesthetic. The two concepts are almost
always anathema to each other—and yet here, on this latest album from Neko
Case, the conflict seems only to afflict the title. For all of its narrators’ implied torment,
everything here sounds just perfect.
Keepers 1-12
September 2013
