It's hard to write about this sort of thing objectively, but Neko Case may well have the perfect voice. There's a moment maybe three minutes into 'Deep Red Bells' when the song stops, the musicians freeze, and Case sings a couple of lines a capella, at once lonesome and forceful, that spin the melody off in a completely new direction. It's a trick of her writing, of course, but her voice has such a calm power that it seems she can bend melodies at will.
Ostensibly we're in alt-country territory, and Neko Case is the much-vaunted heir to Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline. In truth, though, she's more interesting than that. A much-travelled serial collaborator who currently appears to live somewhere between Chicago, Canada and Arizona, Case is one of a diminishing number of artists who can create something living and subversive out of country music. A few years ago, the indie colonisation of country seemed genuinely exciting, and the likes of Wilco, Lambchop and Will Oldham promised to usher in a generation of artists intent on manipulating tradition in challenging new ways. What they did, however, was inadvertently legitimise a bunch of staid hacks, led by the mystifyingly successful Ryan Adams and his ever-expanding coterie.
Neko Case is a refreshing antidote to these dullards. It'd be disingenuous to claim she was doing anything exactly revolutionary. After all, she stands onstage and sings measured, emotionally potent, conventionally structured songs accompanied by a double bassist and a man who flits between guitar, banjo and pedal steel. There are covers of Bob Dylan's 'Buckets Of Rain' and Hank Williams' 'Alone And Forsaken', too: terrific, but hardly evidence of the wheel being reinvented.
That voice, though, is sensational, and more reminiscent of the sainted Kristin Hersh than any Nashville queen. It's at once visceral and effortless: you suspect that if Case hadn't been schooled in the good taste and restraint of indie-rock, she'd overuse it, smother her songs with the yodelling pyrotechnics that seem to come so easily to her. Instead, she reserves her armaments, and then uses them to spare, dynamic effect on the mesmerising likes of 'Ghost Wiring'.
Her other neat trick is to overturn the misogyny endemic in so much Americana. Rather than being taken down to the river to have her skull smashed with a rock, as is traditional, Case metes out the same sort of treatment in song to a succession of deserving boyfriends. So one ends up drowned, while another is burned to ashes in the boiler room of her building. If she was singing at the time, you can only assume they went to their deaths blissfully.
