Neko Case
Fox Confessor Brings The Flood
Neko Case begins Fox
Confessor Brings the Flood with “Margaret vs. Pauline,” written from the
point of view of Margaret, who lost three fingers at the cannery. Margaret envies Pauline, who appears to
effortlessly obtain everything she wants. “Everything’s so easy for Pauline,” Margaret thinks, “Fate holds her
firmly in its cradle.” Usually these
kinds of stories end with the Margaret-type character discovering that the
Pauline-type doesn’t have everything laid out for her as perfectly appears, but
there’s no such revelation here. Neko
Case firmly sees herself as Margaret, and her position is clear: The Paulines of the world do, in fact, exist,
and she will never be one of them. Subsequently, although Fox Confessor
Brings the Flood travels effortlessly through its series of intricately
constructed story-songs, everything Case describes—from the blossoming of love
in “That Teenage Feeling” to the murder in “Dirty Knife”—comes
hard-earned. She may not have lost three
fingers, but her hands have gotten dirty creating these songs, and they sound
like it.
Case mostly steers clear of verse-chorus-verse structures, instead allowing her songs to unfold like short fiction—the music twists and turns to support the storytelling. Without the hooks she manages to wring out of almost every line, however, the album wouldn’t be much of a listen. Thankfully, we get the gospel bounce of “John Saw That Number,” which rides along on an old-West barroom piano. We get “The Needle Has Landed”—the album-closer and catchiest number—which spins a variation on an old theme as Case sings, “If I knew then what’s so obvious now/ You’d still be here, baby.” We get her slow-playing the payoff of “A Widow’s Toast,” in which a circle of women grapple with the ghosts of their dead husbands. She multi-tracks the vocals over a subtle guitar—it almost sounds a capella—to create an aural portrait of memory before laying into the wistful refrain, “It’s a faster love than you and me/ Faster than the speed of gravity.” In fact, the entire album reflects a sense of history intertwining with a vision of the future—the desire to change one’s past or one’s fate usurped by the mundane and often tragic facts of the present. “Better times collide with now,” she sings, “and better times are coming still.”
-Marty Brown, 2006
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