Hell-On missed the initial draft of this list. But looking back at My Favorite Records of 2018, I remembered I had it all the way up at #3, which led to a re-visitation, which led to it bumping Jens Lekman’s I Know What Love Isn’t (still an honorable mention) and leapfrogging five or so other records on this list. Thus is the power of Neko Case, and if this were a proper Best Of this is probably a Top 10 no doubter. Every Neko Case album is an event, and she is one of the rare artists who has not only never made a misstep, but consistently ups her game each time out. Though my heart still belongs to Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (which is why this one isn’t higher on the list), listening to this one again immediately had me sitting slack-jawed at Case’s talent. I’m immediately drawn to the more pop-oriented tunes here. Even though Neko Case’s version of an upbeat pop song is still melancholy, “Bad Luck,” “Last Lion of Albion,” and “Gumball Blue” have fantastic hooks. Which is to say nothing of Case’s songwriting, which is the shining star here. “Curse of the I-5 Corridor” is a seven-minute masterclass in the songcraft. It’s an origin story, but unlike those origin story movies that spend so much time setting up the story, Case meditations on her emergence from the Pacific Northwest with emotional gut punch after emotional gut punch. “In the current of your life/ I was an eyelash in the shipping lanes;” “I miss the smell of mystery/ Reverb leaking out of tavern doors/ And not knowing how the sounds were made;” “The crash it comes/ And pours down my public face/ Behind a reservoir of collarbones/ And forms two private lakes.” Quoting song lyrics in a review hardly ever captures the gravity the words carry in the song, but that’s why Case is a master. She’s Leonard Cohen good. Someone who painstakingly finds just the right phrasing and just keeps getting better.
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