Concert Review: Neko Case at the Uptown
By Scott Wilson in Last Night's Show
Monday, Jul. 20 2009 @ 12:44PM
Brian Wilson had cars and surfboards. Lou Reed had transients and smack. Neko Case, another instinctive songwriter with identifiable lyrical obsessions, has weather and animals. That's considerable symbolic acreage, yet Case -- like Wilson and Reed, to name a couple of past masters -- compresses detached observation and wet hunger into distinctive miniatures. (And her gift for melodic surprise rivals even the old Beach Boy's polished touch.) Tides and floods and tornadoes, tigers and foxes and birds of prey -- Case uses a palette of primal forces to access a dreamworld where love, desire, fidelity and loss take living form and peer from tree trunks or circle overhead. In some of her best songs, they also strike and wound. The 50-watt-eyed owl overlooking Case's stage (and her audience) last night at the Uptown wasn't there to advise how many licks will get you to the center of a Tootsie Pop. A Neko Case owl is a predator.
Following a sleepy set by Anti- labelmate and Grandaddy refugee Jason Lytle, Case and her band, with irreplaceable singer and foil Kelly Hogan out front next to Case, were under way by a little after 9. Opener "Things That Scare Me," the first cut off 2002's Blacklisted, set the evening's agenda and re-established Case's vision: You've got your birds frying on a wire, and you've got your American dream hunting people down, all in about three minutes with no hook or harmony out of place or overextended.
The rest of the night concentrated on this year's nearly perfect Middle Cyclone, with driving arrangements of the few songs with a beat (particularly an extra-Byrdsy "People Got a Lotta Nerve" and a steaming "Red Tide") and shimmering guitar lines replacing the thick piano chords on the album. The loveliest musical conceit on Cyclone, the barn-full-of-pianos Harry Nilsson cover "Don't Forget Me," only gained ache live, thanks to Jon Rauhouse's echoing steel. And those harmonies -- Hogan, a superlative singer with her own album-making knack, blended with and complemented Case to hair-raising effect all night.
Whatever fears lurk within Case's songs, though, she and Hogan offset the night's midtempo portent with easy, often very funny banter between numbers. It's no surprise that Case and her cohort would have an opinion or two to share about the programming on the National Geographic cable channel or a documentary about prison inmates, but hearing them exchange quips (Hogan, without the weight of cult object on her, is free to be the funny one) was a reminder just how removed from the real world Case's writing is. The jabbing brevity of her songs and their pinpoint-precise command of vocal melody neatly camouflage a deep metaphysical streak. The visual collages and animation that accompanied most of the songs on a screen behind the players, never as abstract as, say, R.E.M.'s old projections, lent the production a certain stagy professionalism -- a little visual evidence of Case's growing artistic stature and a comforting reminder that she's of this world and not some terrifying astral projection. But the comedy and the film were just icing on the owl. Case's swooping, hunting, haunted alto and her bloody songs offer more than enough weather and animal on their own.
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| Camille Brecht |
Following a sleepy set by Anti- labelmate and Grandaddy refugee Jason Lytle, Case and her band, with irreplaceable singer and foil Kelly Hogan out front next to Case, were under way by a little after 9. Opener "Things That Scare Me," the first cut off 2002's Blacklisted, set the evening's agenda and re-established Case's vision: You've got your birds frying on a wire, and you've got your American dream hunting people down, all in about three minutes with no hook or harmony out of place or overextended.
The rest of the night concentrated on this year's nearly perfect Middle Cyclone, with driving arrangements of the few songs with a beat (particularly an extra-Byrdsy "People Got a Lotta Nerve" and a steaming "Red Tide") and shimmering guitar lines replacing the thick piano chords on the album. The loveliest musical conceit on Cyclone, the barn-full-of-pianos Harry Nilsson cover "Don't Forget Me," only gained ache live, thanks to Jon Rauhouse's echoing steel. And those harmonies -- Hogan, a superlative singer with her own album-making knack, blended with and complemented Case to hair-raising effect all night.
 |
| Camille Brecht |
Whatever fears lurk within Case's songs, though, she and Hogan offset the night's midtempo portent with easy, often very funny banter between numbers. It's no surprise that Case and her cohort would have an opinion or two to share about the programming on the National Geographic cable channel or a documentary about prison inmates, but hearing them exchange quips (Hogan, without the weight of cult object on her, is free to be the funny one) was a reminder just how removed from the real world Case's writing is. The jabbing brevity of her songs and their pinpoint-precise command of vocal melody neatly camouflage a deep metaphysical streak. The visual collages and animation that accompanied most of the songs on a screen behind the players, never as abstract as, say, R.E.M.'s old projections, lent the production a certain stagy professionalism -- a little visual evidence of Case's growing artistic stature and a comforting reminder that she's of this world and not some terrifying astral projection. But the comedy and the film were just icing on the owl. Case's swooping, hunting, haunted alto and her bloody songs offer more than enough weather and animal on their own.
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