If you didn’t already know that Neko Case has spent the past several years writing for the stage, her new album should give it away. All the time she has spent collaborating on a Broadway-style musical version of the Oscar-winning 1991 film Thelma & Louise has filtered into her own music on Neon Grey Midnight Green, her first new album since 2018. There’s always been an element of drama in Case’s songwriting, but her phrasing and lyrical exposition take on a more theatrical tilt, here on a dozen new tracks, as if she’s building up to the showstoppers.
That is what she’s doing, come to think of it. More than one song here shifts midway through into a new form, with a different tempo or change in melody. “Winchester Mansion of Sound,” for one, finds Case talk-singing free-verse lyrics until there’s a pause in the bright, tack-piano flourishes, and the arrangement expands into a refrain featuring brushed drums and guitars as Case harmonizes with Rachel Flotard of Visqueen. It’s vintage Neko, reflecting her distinctive take on Americana. Later, “Little Gears” follows a similar path, shifting from waltz-time into a four-count beat for a chorus that lasts about forty-five seconds before sliding back to a waltz. Really, though, the technical details matter less than the feelings they evoke, and when Case switches from loosely structured verses into a tightly arranged chorus, the sense of musical resolution is akin to a beam of sun cutting through an overcast sky.
With lyrics that describe watching as a spider builds a web, “Little Gears” is one of several songs on Neon Grey Midnight Green steeped in imagery of the natural world. That’s been a recurring theme in Case’s music over the years. It anchored her 2009 LP Middle Cyclone, for example, and was also a central motif in The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, the spellbinding memoir she published earlier this year. If nature has sustained Case for most of her life, so has music, and Neon Grey Midnight Green is a tribute to musicians—some of those she’s singing about here were friends who died in recent years, including Dallas Green from the Sadies, Kim Shattuck of the Muffs, and Dexter Romweber, an early influence when she first encountered his ’80s power-duo Flat Duo Jets.
Romweber is the subject of “Winchester Mansion of Sound,” a title likely inspired by the idiosyncratic, maze-like “mystery house” in San Jose—a fitting analogy for the thrillingly eclectic jumble of Romweber’s music. Opening track “Destination” also feels like a tribute to someone who burned brightly, and Case projects her powerful voice over an arrangement that builds from simple piano, guitar and drums to the cinematic sweep of strings from the PlainSong Chamber Orchestra. The group contributed to five songs on the album, including a pastoral arrangement that sweetens Case’s disdain on “Rusty Mountain” as she dismisses conventional expressions of romance in music as an “exercise in futility.” “We all deserve better / Than some love song,” she sings, as violins and acoustic guitar well up around her voice.
It’s not really a stretch to view Neko Case as someone who has been working her entire career to sidestep love songs in favor of something that feels truer, more emotionally real, even (or maybe especially) when it’s gritty. Her approach on Neon Grey Midnight Green is more esoteric, with less reliance on standard song forms in favor of something looser and more free-flowing. Sometimes that means she builds up to the hooks instead of sprinkling them throughout, but she holds these songs together by the strength of her voice and the rich potency of her imagination.
Read our recent digital cover story with Neko Case here.
Eric R. Danton has been contributing to Paste since 2013. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and Pitchfork, among other publications. He writes Freak Scene, a newsletter about music in Western Massachusetts and Connecticut.
