Neko Case
Fox Confessor Brings The Flood (Anti-)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Amplifier, March-April 2006

For those of us who discovered Neko Case in the first few seconds of Mass Romantic, her solo career has served as a curious diversion in between too-infrequent spotlights on New Pornographers albums. Fox Confessor Brings The Flood finds her drawing so far outside the lines of the alt-country that she explored in the dawn of her career that she might as well be in another book altogether. Layered with a dusky, reverbed bed of sound that conjures up the indistinct haze of a somnambulant drive through the woods at twilight, all it needs in order to take on unsettling undertones is placement in a David Lynch film. As a writer, Case lacks the melodic gifts of her fellow Pornographer Carl Newman, which keeps her amazing voice on a low boil for most of the album. Some details call attention to themselves, like the piano constantly frolicking up and down the keyboard in the opening “Margaret vs. Pauline” and the “Breaking The Girl” acoustic guitar of the title track. The best track is “John Saw That Number,” which with its thumping drums and electric piano solo could be any standard gospel-folk revival song, if it weren’t for that booming, echoing voice that eventually splits into multiple Cases in a call-and-response with one another as the song comes to a rousing close.

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