The third impeccable album in a row from Neko Case (fourth if one includes the live Tigers), and her most abstract and impressionistic yet. She's never particularly been one for conventional song structures, particularly since the watershed of Blacklisted, but Middle Cyclone is a step further than anything Case has recorded before, and it's increasingly exciting to see the direction that she's going in - the result is something edging ever closer to 'pure' music, and already it sounds very far from anything else that's happening out there...there are traces of all the ground she's staked out before, the haunted, shadowy country-noir terrain which picked up such intriguing resonances in Fox Confessor in particular, but now writ anew.
It seems besides the point to discuss individual tracks, for this is a record about texture, sound and melody rather than discrete parts...the shorter mood pieces work as well as the fuller songs; the whole is more than the sum of its parts. It makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.
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Previously (in order of release/happening rather than order of listening by me): The Virginian, Furnace Room Lullaby, Canadian Amp, Blacklisted, The Tigers Have Spoken, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, and live.
