(ANTI- Records, CD, digital, vinyl)
Neko Case’s sound is often characterized as indie rock or country noir. While hardly off base, those labels barely begin to describe the work of the maverick Northeast Kingdom singer-songwriter who’s a member of such disparate acts as the New Pornographers and case/lang/veirs. Released in late September, Case’s eighth solo album, Neon Grey Midnight Green, pushes the envelope even further over 12 idiosyncratic tracks.
Recorded at Carnassial Sound in St. Johnsbury, Neon Grey Midnight Green is Case’s first self-produced album. While it contains winks aplenty to various influences, listeners need not be detectives to pick up on her penchant for gothic Americana and the kinetic vocal stylings of Tina Turner and Patsy Cline. Backed by Denver’s PlainsSong Project chamber orchestra, a project of DeVotchKa member Tom Hagerman, Case’s definitive debut as a producer sees her taking a turn toward expert countrified baroque.
The album’s first track, “Destination,” begins as imperceptibly as the moment when nighttime gives way to daybreak. Then a piano breaks into a parade of perky quarter notes, rising to an epiphanic fervor. There to conduct the upswell of energy, Case enters with a salutatory nod to listeners old and new: “Hello stranger,” she sings, her voice as warm and omnipotent as the sun. “You remind me of someone / A jangling lust / Pouncing on a sliver / of a dusty pool of light.” Interweaving animal imagery with human sensibility, Case gives us a lyrical chimera full of whimsy, melancholy and resonant depth.
Neon Grey Midnight Green teems with moments like these, when a few raw elements transmute into entire tapestries, and it’s not long until the découpaged first track transforms yet again. Over a lush, cinematic arrangement, Case sings of musicians — those seedy, precious souls who sing life into auditoriums where “closing time never comes.”
The album’s lead single, “Wreck,” starts with an eerie hook, sung in the vein of a nursery rhyme delivered by the Shirelles, before a clash of swirling strings arrives like a tornado. The album’s closer, “Match-Lit,” returns to the country-noir sound for which Case is known, complete with pedal-steel twang and a rapturous folk-rock beat.
Through it all, Case isn’t afraid to get ugly with emotion and sound. “An Ice Age” is a slow-burning tour de force reckoning with cultural expectations of beauty. The song serves as an indictment of her own complicity, and a later track, “Baby, I’m Not (a Werewolf),” delivers the verdict: “I ate every story / I ate every myth.”
The album’s most searing offering is its title track. Case’s evocative songwriting sits atop densely packed drones, yielding to full-out cries over heavy, propulsive Led Zeppelin-esque guitar riffs. Here and everywhere on Neon Grey Midnight Green, the artist’s experimental, charging sound is on full display.
More than just proof of her godlike musicianship, the album is a tribute to her many muses — the musicians, collaborators and dearly departed friends who have informed her shape-shifting sound and prolific career. Indeed, as Case attested on Instagram, “This album is for and about musicians, it is a love letter and a testimony.”
Neon Grey Midnight Green is streaming on all major platforms. Catch Case at the Flynn on Sunday, January 11, with support from Des Demonas.
This article appears in The Tech Issue 2025.
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