Illustration by Mary Blair from The New Golden Songbook, 1955
Middle Cyclone is the first Neko Case record that I've bought at the time of its release. Like a lot of people, I first heard Neko sing on "Letter from an Occupant" by the New Pornographers. Like a lot of people, I immediately started tracking down her solo albums because I found her voice so compelling. And, like a lot of people, I was baffled by how different her modus operandi was on those albums from the straight-forward power-pop of her "side project" with Carl Newman. I love those early solo albums now, but the mix of sophisticated alterna-country and oddball covers on those records was a hard sell at first. And I have to admit that I still don't own a copy of Fox Confessor - I listened to several tracks online when it came out ("That Teenage Feeling", "Star Witness", "Hold On Hold On"), and they didn't make much of an impression. So I didn't make it a priority. Today, listening to Middle Cyclone, I think I may have missed an important stage in Neko's development as a solo artist - I'm going to fill that gap in my collection soon.
Middle Cyclone is a pop album - it's almost like her career is finally converging with my original set of expectations (the ones that came from hearing her sing "Letter from an Occupant"). Two of the album's first three tracks are straight-forward pop singles with full, harmony-laden arrangements and great choruses - "This Tornado Loves You" and "People Got a Lotta Nerve" are two of the best Neko compositions I've heard, and they introduce the album's two prevailing themes (natural disasters and fauna, respectively). "People Got a Lotta Nerve" is an especially welcome surprise - there is almost a Brit-pop sound in the jangly guitar intro (at least to me it sounds more Razorcuts than Byrds). The album is fairly pop-oriented throughout, but it maintains a nice dynamic. The sequencing is quite good - it may even be a little backloaded - the only weak tracks are the overly melodramatic "Polar Nettles" and "Prison Girls". The covers she picks this time around (by Sparks and Nilsson) are both favorites of mine, and I like what she does with them.
I find myself drawn back to the album's "b-side" again and again - it is an almost flawless second half (the useless 30-minute final track of frog chirruping notwithstanding). The final song, "Red Tide", is particularly impressive, balancing Neko's sense of drama with a modern arrangement that emphasizes the song's native tension. The lyric brings the theme of "animal uprising" back again, with the mollusks having defeated the red tide, but this ominous sign represents a very human threat that is never really spelled out. Something's about to happen that'll make you wish you could "go back and die at the drive-in."
"Red Tide" by Neko Case
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