She’s back! After three years, Neko Case has reemerged to seduce listeners once more with those big lungs of hers. If the cover art for Middle Cyclone is any indication (she is pictured perched on the hood of a car with a rapier at the ready), she has returned with a vengeance.
With this album, her sixth solo effort, Case decided to go back to nature for inspiration, which she found on her 100-acre farm in rural Vermont. She filled her drafty 200-year-old barn with eight found pianos salvaged from craigslist to create an orchestra that appears on several tracks such as “This Tornado Loves You,” the spooky “Polar Nettles,” and “Don’t Forget Me.” The latter is a lovely cover of a Harry Nilsson tune and another track, “Don’t Turn Your Back on Mother Earth,” is a goofy take on a Sparks’ song. The remaining twelve tracks are positively Neko, all self written and infused with her enigmatic poetics and bittersweet smoky twang that echoes Patsy Cline.
Not one to test the waters with a tentative toe, Case dives right in with the album’s first song, “This Tornado Loves You,” an up-tempo, thumping ode to a misplaced love interest. In the song’s first line, she declares, “I am the speed of sound” and later likens her patience to a glacier’s and her courage to the roar of the sun. It’s clear that, when engaged in the game of love, she ceases being just a woman and spins into a force of nature to be reckoned with. She sings over insistent guitars of the destruction precipitated by her desire and the havoc left in her wake (a trail of smashed transformers, broken necks in ditches, and the “motherless, fatherless”) as she searches for the one that got away or never was.
This isn’t the first time Case has alluded to her more perilous attributes. In 2006’s Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, she sings, “My own blood is much too dangerous,” as if warning suitors that loving her could prove fatal. This advisory carries over to “The Next Time You Say Forever,” a quiet yet bold song in which she cautions: “The next time you say forever/ I will punch you in your face.” And in the cute and catchy first single, “People Got a Lot of Nerve,” she sings to the men who didn’t heed her warnings: “I’m a man eater, but you’re still surprised when I eat you.” Case has said that, for this song, she was inspired by zoo attacks and how the mauled are somehow shocked that caged animals remain wild. The song serves as a reminder to those who have forgotten that nature and instinct cannot be domesticated or tamed, and neither can she.
Case’s obsession with the animal kingdom, beautifully expressed on previous projects, also has a place on Middle Cyclone. She sings of owls on sills, elephants who don’t forget, and killer whales. And, on “I’m an Animal,” she joins the ranks of these beasts, proclaiming: “I’m an animal and you’re an animal, too.” In saying so, she becomes the subject and makes way for an invasion of a much more interior, personal territory than on previous albums.
