After he decided that retirement was a blank check for side quests, my dad went to Antarctica on a research vessel. He floated out in a kayak on the Southern Ocean to meet the locals: Humpback whales. The giants pirouetted under the kayaks, blew steam on the visitors, and poked their heads above the water, their great, curious eyes watching. When it came time to return to the boat, the whales used their bodies to block the route. As one scientist explained, “they want to play more.” My dad said he felt true awe then, fear and euphoria. These incomprehensibly large creatures, mysterious, and intelligent were essentially saying “recess isn’t over.”
This is the realm in which Neko Case rules. Like Karen Russel or Salman Rushdie, magical realism is her domain—poking at reality while myth nibbles at the corners. She came from a hall of fame class of North American lyricists in the 2000s. Next to the absurdists (Andrew Bird, Dan Bejar), cosmologists (Joanna Newsom, Sufjan Stevens), and the realists (Bill Callahan, Chan Marshall), Case weaponized mystic imagery and her own gale-powered voice to craft a career as unique as it is haunting.
Case broke out twice. First in the triumvirate of the New Pornographers (alongside Bejar and pop professor AC Newman): it was Case’s strident, unwavering voice that opened Mass Romantic, the Porno’s beloved debut, and though her adoration of Lucinda Williams was obvious, the spikey powerchords of “Letter from an Occupant” revealed Case loved Siouxsie and the Banshees just as much. After two excellent and overlooked albums, her solo career stepped into the spotlight with 2002’s Blacklisted. The climax, “I Wish I Was the Moon” sighed onto the scene, a spiritual sequel to both Fugazi’s “I’m So Tired” and Judy Collin’s version of “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” elevating the album to underground classic status and ensuring she’d have a cultish fanbase on her own.
20 years ago, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood used that foundation to launch into absolute confidence. It’s a perfect distillation of all of Case’s eccentricities and influences. The love of pre-Beatles music is obvious from the dry, warm guitar tones and the deep, lovely reverb that scatters Case’s voice like she’s been plucked from the Ink Spots. It helps to have The Band’s own Garth Hudson on keys, lending a grandfatherly touch and implicitly passing off a torch. Case recorded the album in Tucson and invited Arizona royalty Calexico into the studio, essentially stealing their rhythm section for the entire record. John Convertino’s shuffling drum parts and Joey Burns hopping between half a dozen instruments grants a desert worn hardiness to the record.
All of this gives a noir-ish tinge to the songs. Case sings a smattering of them like she’s an investigative reporter, frustrated at missing details. “My true love drowned in a dirty old pan of oil / That did run from the block / Of a Falcon sedan 1969 / The paper said ’75,” is how she opens the stunning “Star Witness.” She’d later confirm that was a true story, based on a gang shooting in Chicago she witnessed. The official lyrics say the chorus is “There’s such tender wolves ’round town tonight,” but I always heard it as “dandy wolves,” recalling Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London,” Case’s alluring predators either looking for more carnage or “beef chow mein.”
Fox Confessor, from its title down, evokes Eastern European fairytales. Case’s family is Ukrainian, and she described their myths as “dark,” “funny,” and “not overly moral.” See “Dirty Knife,” which opens with “suddenly the madness came” as Case’s voice floats above a huntsman suffering in a log cabin. Depending on the reading, it’s either one of the most powerful sonic representations of a psychotic break or a literal pack of demonic wolves beating down the door of Red Riding Hood’s would be savior. Case and a phantom harmony fall into a Ukrainian chant at the end, giving no closure, only an eerie chill.
Case updates another old archetype on opener “Margaret vs. Pauline.” It’s a successor to Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper with an industrial twist. Pauline is flapper royalty—the gods “smoothed her hair with cinnamon waves / And they placed an ingot in her breast”—while the blue collared, rundown Margaret has “jaw aches from wanting and she’s sick from chlorine.” The undulating pianola-style lick stumbles as Case turns the knife in their comparisons. “One left her sweater sittin’ on the train / And the other lost three fingers at the cannery.” Case would be many women over her career (and later she’d claim “I fucked every man I wanted to be”) but starting with the album cover, Fox Confessor creates an internal dichotomy within her. Case is the glorious, luck-touched Pauline and the hardscrabble Margaret. She embodies both a cool collected beauty who radiates danger, and the poor girl who got her head lopped off on the album art.
The single straightforwardly autobiographical cut is “Hold On, Hold On.” But in opposition to the characters trapped in the thrall of their narratives on the rest of Fox Confessor, Case rallies against her own fate. There’s an undisclosed punch-up at a wedding where Case is cast as a villain (“In the end I was the mean girl”) but she embraces the heel turn. She leaves the party with a “valium from the bride” and no beau on her arms (“thank god”) before turning her ire on centuries of songwriting. “That echo chorus lied to me with its ‘Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on,’” she fumes as she escapes into the night. Pop choruses with tidy endings are too simple. Weddings where you catch the bouquet and find true love are too twee. To quote Achewood, most dreams (and Neko Case songs) go “The end! No moral!”
Case’s use of tenor guitar across the album makes it a perfect late fall listen. The entwining, descending riff on “Hold On, Hold On,” perfectly captures the vision of snowflakes just starting to tumble down. There’s also the music box opening of “That Teenage Feeling” and the shuffling roil on “The Needle Has Landed” which kicks snow off the road, like Case and Co. are driving through a chilly night to the next gig. “At Last” has a shade of Indigo Girls tenderness with its silvery, shivering guitar that stays sparse, letting Case’s tremendous voice holler all its glory.
There’s a stormy, oceanic churn to these songs. Case discards the classic verse-chorus-verse format for Fox Confessor in favor of sections that appear like sudden squalls on the horizon. “Dirty Knife,” “Lion’s Jaws,” and “The Needle has Landed” all have tempo shifts that arrive like a bolt from the blue. And the title track lurches into its bridge like thunder had just hit the studio and overloaded the amps. When combined with moments of abrupt violence and tonal shifts, it feels like there’s a great mass shuddering beneath the skin of these songs, a leviathan that only comes briefly into sight while breaching the surface.
Contemporary reviews laser-focused on the power of her voice, as though her pipes were the cake and the rest of the music so much frosting. It betrays a lack of curiosity for a fiercely intelligent, devilishly complex album that rewards dozens of subsequent listens. There’s word-nerd brilliance to be found, with a delightful, rhyming mouthfeel across the album. “Nickels and dimes of the Fourth of July / Roll off in a crooked line / To the chain-link lots where the red tails dive,” she grins on “Star Witness.” And the hurricane in her lungs was only powerful because she knew restraint. Her voice, of course, is never short of beautiful, but on a song like “A Widow’s Toast,” she’s also a brilliant minimalist. A chorus of Cases seem to gather around one microphone like an old radio play. When she sings “specters move like pilot flames” she’s describing the tidbits of sound that hover in the background of every song, small easter eggs to subconsciously direct the listener. Thanks to the dynamic contrast, when she does uncork a fastball, it’s liable to break bones.
“Maybe Sparrow” is the emotional summit of the album, Case beginning with a coo as she sings to some poor, broken critter. But the song picks up steam like a rushing locomotive, Case’s voice rising to a howl. There’s an implication of an airplane crash, then Case fully submits to simply wailing, her final flip into falsetto an absolute heartbreak. The story is purposefully unclear. “Maybe Sparrow” can be used as a totem for any cry of sudden, shattering grief.
Case has consistently anthropomorphized herself. She wanted to be the moon; she’d become a tornado, a radioactive ore, even an entire continent. However, on Fox Confessor, Case is either in her own body or in that of a third person narrator, pulling back and observing. For all the apocalyptic, mythical moments, Fox Confessor is Case’s most human album in its perspective. She, like us, is getting brief glimpses at the inner gears of the universe, left to ponder its meaning and her place in the machinery.
In her memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, Case remembered the day when she started to become comfortable with being a capital M “Musician.” She was in the bath, listening back to demo tapes. She recast the fight she’d been in for years while soaking. “I really could swim next to Moby Dick without him eating me,” she said. “Or me harpooning him.” She had entered a conversation with her uncapturable muse, rather than trying to run him down. It’s a perfect metaphor for her own career, but even better for the experience of listening to Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. We swim next to a leviathan, only partially understanding its vastness, but still always glad to be caught in its wake.
Nathan Stevens is a musician, archivist, and podcaster whose work has appeared in Spectrum Culture, Stereogum, and Popmatters. He currently runs the music interview website Drwoodhouse.com
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