According to Playboy.com, Neko Case is the "Sexiest Babe of Indie Rock." Fortunately for the listening public, such a lofty title hasn't gone to Miss Case's head. "I'm not out to become Faith Hill," she says. "I never want to play an arena, and I never want to be on the MTV Video Music Awards, much less make a video with me in it." Substance is clearly the priority for Case, famous for her D.I.Y ethic, though I'd be lying if I said that she didn't have armfuls of style to go with it.
While Case first cut her teeth playing drums in the Vancouver punk scene, and later rose to some fame as the voice of power-pop gang The New Pornographers, her solo records have a distinct - and perhaps unexpected - country twang to them. Listening to Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, it's hard to imagine her singing anything else. Case's rich, passionate voice seems to have been made for lonesome ballads of heartache and regret, each song a vignette of Nashville remorse.
On "Hold On, Hold On," Case tells us that "the most tender place in [her] heart is for strangers", and it's this place that she offers to us on Fox Confessor Brings the Flood It is a glimpse into a melancholy world where 'true love is drowned in a dirty old pan of oil'. In "That Teenage Feeling" we meet a woman plagued by "secrets that keep [her] from loving", while in "Dirty Knife", a song which ends with a haunting Ukrainian piece sung over jagged cellos, we're witness to a man driven to self-destruction by fear of the "wolves that eddy out the corner of his eyes". Even the fall of a sparrow is lamentable and heart-breaking when retold in Case's croon.
Though Fox Confessor Brings the Flood may be blue, amidst this bleak vision there is some small hope. 'Better times are coming still', Case assures us on "A Widow's Toast". We can only pray that those better times don't come too soon - at least not before Neko writes her next album.
