The rain. The damned rain, and so cold for August. Such is the price and the peril of the Northwest Corner, and every time the bill comes due there is bitter complaint before we settle back, coffee or beer in hand, melancholy in the heart, and find some music to complement the dreadfulness.
Tonight my choice is Neko Case's brilliant and under appreciated (to my mind) 2005 release Fox Confessor Brings The Flood. A sombre affair with twelve too brief tracks of country twinged accounts of desperate characters and personal remembrance. The album opens with the tale of "Margaret vs Pauline", two girls who couldn't be more different -- One left her sweater sitting on a train, and the other lost her fingers in the cannery. Everything is indeed so easy for Pauline, who Fate holds firm in her cradle, while Margaret's jaw aches from wanting.
The album continues with the track "Star Witness", and, while I promise not to do a track by track recap, this one bears mention. It is, as I recall (this is a blog dear, not the Times), a recap of a shooting, the aftermath Case was witness to. The despair of the family, the witnesses, while the police attend with indifference; another day on the job. This is nothing new, no television crew, they don't even put on the siren; her nightgown sweeps the sidewalk clean; oh don't let her die. All in all, biting social commentary on the way that tragedy and violence is viewed when it happens to those without the benefit of privilege. (Also, the horror of the lyric Hey pretty baby get high with me, we can go to my sister's if we say we'll watch the baby also bears repeating.)
Case continues in this vein, dark songs about dark people, moving in a new direction musically, not quite forsaking the honky tonk roots that brought her to where she is, but building on them, crafting something new. (Something new and exciting, and I am on veritable pins and needles for the followup!) The music still shows the influences of classic country, but it is not as pronounced as her last, Blacklisted, and is certainly leaps and bounds beyond the swing of The Virginian. As a singer, Case has always tended to be drawn to the darkness -- both Blacklisted and Furnace Room Lullaby (the very title dark, sexual, violent) depict her in photographs on the cover the victim of some horrible violence.
The darkness is seductive, and Case's childhood in the South Puget Sound is consistently pervasive in her music. The final track on the record, "The Needle Has Landed" references her departure from the area, being left at the Greyhound the day she moved away, and she promises that "if i knew then whats so obvious now , you'd still be here baby". And who hasn't made that promise, really? If you knew then what was so obvious now, there's always something that you would take back, something that you would fix. Right?
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