Neko Case 3/31/06 @ Vic Theatre

Case shows songwriting power behind ‘Fox Confessor’

April 3, 2006

BY ANDERS SMITH LINDALL

Not so long ago, Neko Case was the new kid in town. A sassy-voiced singer, she recorded a sepia-toned collection of mostly twang and pop covers for the Bloodshot Records boots-and-piercings crowd, and often popped up onstage with Kelly Hogan.

How times have changed. In recent years Case has become a dazzling songwriter as well as a skillful interpreter, adding soul, gospel and shadowy, brooding rock to her repertoire. Her new disc, "Fox Confessor Brings the Flood," is backed by a label, Anti-, that appeals more to drinkers of soy latte than Maker's Mark. And now it's Hogan who pops up onstage with her.

The venues Case plays have changed, too, for the bigger. Her gig Friday was at the Vic -- a room that could hold several Hideouts just in its balcony -- and it sold out well in advance.

If there were jitters, though, Case didn't show them. Guitarist Paul Rigby and drummer Jason Creps have added depth and range to her band's veteran core of Tom Ray (bass) and Jon Rauhouse (banjo and steel), and together with Hogan on backing vocals the group was sharp from the start.

The early going mirrored sets Case played recently at the South by Southwest music industry conference in Austin, Texas; in front of those crowds, comprised largely of insiders who can make or break an artist, she was impressive but businesslike, focused on delivering the "Fox Confessor" material without a hitch.

Those new songs continue in the moody vein established by her 2002 album "Blacklisted," though her latest lyrics and melodies are increasingly unpredictable. Still exploring her writer's chops, Case seems to have challenged herself to work outside the usual structure of linear narrative and verse-chorus composition, and though the results are often conventionally beautiful, they're not always entirely satisfying. Pop listeners want hooks to hang their hats on, and when a song like Case's new "Hold On" only gives up its gorgeous chorus once, it leaves us wanting more.

But Friday night the new tunes shone, especially the propulsive, wailing "If You Knew" and the rippling, densely imagistic "Star Witness." In fact, it was only in comparison to the likes of "Set Out Running" and "I Wish I Was the Moon" that they paled at all. Broken in, familiar and both dripping with Rauhouse's caramel steel, the older songs sounded nothing less than timeless.

Later on, a looser Case came through. She bantered with Hogan about steroids and Paul Stanley and needled Rauhouse about his new electric omelet maker. And she played a clutch of old covers, finding smoky soul in Bob Dylan's rickety "Buckets of Rain" and Freakwater's haunted "Hex," and doing justice to Sarah Vaughan's smoldering classic "I'll Be Around."

Together, the show's two halves suggested that though Case is going places, she can still come home again.

Anders Smith Lindall is a Chicago free-lance writer.

Case shows songwriting power behind 'Fox Confessor'

Chicago Sun-Times Neko Case Review


Transcendent Case's music paves way through bad times

By Greg Kot
Tribune music critic
Published April 3, 2006

Even a bad case of feedback and a trip to the doctor's office earlier in the day couldn't get Neko Case down.

The sold-out concert Friday at the Vic Theatre nearly didn't happen, because the singer needed to make an emergency trip to the doctor a few hours before show time. For her troubles, she came armed with a bandage on her sleeveless right arm and a fistful of new jokes about steroid injections, but the voice was very much intact. Case projects like she's singing in a cathedral with light pouring through stained-glass windows, even when she's singing about darkness, dementia and death.

Case is the diva who wears gym shoes, a down-home successor to Loretta Lynn not just as a singer but as a songwriter, arranger, producer and beer-drinking buddy. She wrote most of the songs performed Friday, and though informed by centuries-deep gospel, country and soul, they are swirling, hallucinatory tales of madness and death that hold a mirror to the bad news outside.

Case doesn't preach about morality or politics, but her music paves a way through bad times. Even when things get ugly, it's possible to transcend, and the singer proved it in both word and deed over the weekend. Near the end of "Set Out Running," when amplifier feedback all but ruined her a cappella finale, Case smiled, flashed the devil's horns and made a joke about multi-instrumentalist Jon Rauhouse's omelet maker. Talk about grace in the face of disaster.

Conflict guides Case's songwriting. Cathartic tears rained in "Fox Confessor Brings the Flood," blood flowed like the dream sequences in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" in "Dirty Knife," and sexy wolves howled in "Star Witness."

Yet the singer's voice inevitably transcended these surreal images of horror, an instrument of beauty that Case expertly controlled. She created moments of high drama: the goose bump-building intro to "John Saw that Number"; the way she turned the word "hard" into a multioctave, multisyllable aria all by itself on "That Teenage Feeling"; the stair-step of notes she effortlessly climbed on "Furnace Room Lullaby."

But this concert was something more than a pageant for a virtuoso voice, a low-budget showcase for a countrified Whitney or Celine. Her ability to walk the octaves may be out of this world, but Case is as down-to-earth as a singer can get. Her casual camaraderie, joke-laced rapport and musical interplay with her accomplices were as crucial to setting and sustaining the mood as her singing prowess. Kelly Hogan's harmonies were a comforting shadow, and the call and response coda to "John Saw that Number" was enough to make anyone reconsider their faith, or lack of it.

Case's music defies category, because it melds so many influences into something that doesn't tidily add up to a commercial-radio format. But if there can be such a thing as secular gospel, Case and her bandmates were surely singing it.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-0604030116apr03,1,2937489.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

Chicago Tribune Neko Case Review