It's true, Blacklisted is, as Case sings on the windswept "Things That Scare Me", haunted by American dreams. Banjo and steel string guitar drift through the record; listening to it, one is left with a sense of vast spaces and solitary drifters, plains and tumbleweed. Case's is a distinctly naturalistic universe, in which humans play out their bloody, urgent dramas against the backdrop of an essentially unyielding landscape; Blacklisted, moreover, is a thoroughly nocturnal record, lit by the flicker of campfires or else by the moon.
Many of the songs on Blacklisted are really just fragments, impressionistic slivers, but it's the way they come together that counts; that said, individual song highlights are studded throughout, from more countryfied numbers like "Deep Red Bells" (a resounding, resonant murder ballad which also happens to be one of the few songs on the album where Case really gives full play to her rich, expressive voice, and to great effect) and "Tightly" to the swelling, soulful, torch-touched trio of "Look For Me (I'll Be Around)", "I Wish I Was The Moon" and "Runnin' Out Of Fools". In any event, there's something poetically elliptical about even the most straightforward of her songs, and the music on Blacklisted seems all of a piece.
It's funny how these things go. I reckon that if Case hasn't already attained greatness, then she's right on the verge of it, and while Blacklisted was the first unequivocal shot across the bows of that particular horizon (to mix my metaphors somewhat), each of her subsequent studio lps, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood and Middle Cyclone has probably been richer and more fully-realised than this one, deeper and broader without losing anything of the concentrated power of her vision - and yet it's Blacklisted that remains my favourite, and there's something more to that than simply the loyalty that we tend to feel for those records that introduce us to artists who later become favourites...something about the way that it powerfully invokes an idea and a sense of place, imagined, to be sure, but all the more vividly for it.
