Album of the Week

{...from Time Out Chicago ... for a somewhat revised version, go here ...}

Neko Case

Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
(Anti-)

Reverb swathes Neko Case in an angelic glow on her latest album. It catches her up into a rapturous cloud and somehow makes her voice—already vibrant and rich in emotional nuance—into something atmospheric. It also gives the material on the Chicago singer-songwriter’s fourth studio album a specific vibe whose pleasures, paradoxically, aren’t so easy to pin down.

Fox Confessor Brings the Flood is a blissfully out-of-time song cycle that evokes a lot of different things, and keeps revealing more with each listen. At any turn, we’re reminded of old-school country-gospel harmonies, the otherworldly twang of Angelo Badalamenti soundtracks, the early 1960s dream pop of half-forgotten girl groups and doo-wop swains, and the soulful Americana of the Band (yep, that is Garth Hudson playing piano and organ on several cuts). But, mostly, we marvel at how Case inhabits this ephemeral world of sound as if it were her own private playhouse—a jukebox of the mind, stuffed with tumbleweeds and glimmer.

Four years in the making, between Case’s stints backing up various pals (like John Doe), working various side projects and performing with the New Pornographers, Fox Confessor is unabashedly retro in spirit yet contemporary in its imagination. Her collaborators, who include members of Calexico and the Sadies, help create intricate and detailed arrangements that animate the lyrics with subtle flourishes. These allow Case to sidestep the literal in her songwriting, as she delves into self-invented fables (“Margaret vs. Pauline”), dwells in sweet-sad waltz-time (“Star Witness,” “That Teenage Feeling”), dials up John the Revelator (“John Saw that Number”), and limns enigmatic scenarios (“The Needle Has Landed”) that resolve in cello-and-dulcimer duets and a few descending guitar notes that keep echoing—even when the reverb is off.