More excitement - the new Neko Case is out there! Got it today, and have had it on replay since while lying around and scrawling out a letter (my first handwritten letter in months) - a luxurious way to spend the afternoon, but in some ways a necessary one, too, for I definitely needed some alone time just about now. Anyway, that's by the by - regarding the album, the unsurprising news is that Fox Confessor Brings The Flood is smashingly good. I haven't got around to The Tigers Have Spoken yet, mostly because it's a live album (even though there's quite a lot of new material on it), but of course Blacklisted is, like, one of my favourite albums of all time (#20 according to that list I made a little while ago, and I'd probably bump it up a few spots were I to reorder the list today), so my expectations were high; colour me delighted that those expectations have basically been fully met by this new record.
Essentially, it's that same kind of haunted, evocative, nocturnal country-noir by way of classic torch chanteuses as well as traditional folk, with echoes of rootsy revivalists like Giant Sand and Calexico (members of whom again appear on the record) and modern alt-country, and all tied up by the glory that is Case's voice. But there is a bit of a progression from her last studio album apparent on Fox Confessor. For one, where Case's retro-styled cues were formerly taken mainly from the torch and soul side of things (most directly on Blacklisted, in covers of "Look For Me I'll Be Around" and "Runnin' Out Of Fools"), here there's a slight move towards the 60s 'pop' end of things (main evidence for this: "That Teenage Feeling" and "Lion's Jaws") - subtle, but it's there, not least in some of the upper register warbling. Also, I think that there's a bit more of an 'indie' streak running through the new album than on previous ones (obviously, y'know, in a Whiskeytown/The Execution of All Things/Laura Veirs/etc sort of way - not that her music sounds anything like either of those - rather than in a Sonic Youth or Pixies kinda fashion). Another change is that the music on this new album is a bit more multi-hued than on those of Case's previous records which I've listened to - there's more variety and a bit more playing around which is almost always effective and also helps to keep things interesting (again, it's only a relatively subtle change, but it's definitely there).
So far, my favourite song on Fox Confessor is "Hold On, Hold On", and I also particularly like "Margaret Vs Pauline", "Star Witness", "That Teenage Feeling" and "The Needle Has Landed", but I've hardly absorbed the album yet, so those picks are even more subject to change than usual. Plus, even outside of those songs, there are so many delicious moments when everything just comes together exactly right and picks you up before you've even realised what was happening ("John Saw That Number" is full of these unexpected pickups).
If you'll forgive a brief lapse into unbecoming juvenilia, dear reader: yay for Neko Case!
