If you had ever questioned whether you would pickup Neko Case’s latest album, Middle Cyclone, you can listen to the entire thing on the National Public Radio website. NPR has does America a great service by sharing this and shedding light on another great contribution to the often-regrettable cannon of recent Country Music.
I’ve long thought Neko Case might be too uncompromising for mainstream success. Her humorous and vociferous interview with Pitchfork found her in a mood to burn bridges while taking shots at Celine Dion, Shania Twain and much of the recording industry. That’s all well and good, but her last album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, seemed to veer into an extreme seriousness that sapped some of the fun out of the music.
Middle Cyclone feels more relaxed than Fox Confessor, returning to the dark beauty of Blacklisted, probably her best album. Love is a theme on Middle Cyclone, but it reaches well beyond individual, romantic love, into the realm of spiritual and elemental longing, out-of-reach but not intangible. Case’s music is still serious and uncompromising, but she brings to it the kind of infatuating gentleness that makes boys fall in love with girls they know they’ll never get.
Camera Obscura’s My Maudlin Career
This is a heads-up for probable awesomeness. As they did with Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone, NPR will be streaming Camera Obscura’s new album, My Maudlin Career, beginning at 11:59pm tonight. Based on the sample track, French Navy, this should be another great album from Camera Obscura, whose last album, Let’s Get Out of This Country, reminded me of a pop re-imagining of the Good the Bad and the Ugly score.
*Update*
Well, as expected, it’s a solid album. I think I prefer Let’s Get Out of This Country a bit, largely for its more ethereal instrumentation. That may be my peculiar taste, and I could see many people preferring this album, because the individual songs seem to stand out a little more on their own.
Comparisons aside, I’m certain this album will be entering our household soon, and will be played frequently when we’re kicking back.