2000 // Neko Case and Her Boyfriends, Furnace Room Lullaby // “Twist the Knife”
Reviews: Pitchfork (2007 rerelease) // NME // Salon // Popmatters
Once upon a time there was a Canadian honky tonk princess, except she wasn’t a really a Canadian honky tonk princess at all. She was punk rock girl born in Virginia and raised in Tacoma. But she got the hell out of that bleak locale and moved to Vancouver to go to art school and be in a bunch of darling bands like Maow, which is why everyone thinks she’s a Canuck. Well, that and the fact that she moonlights in Canadian supergroup The New Pornographers. Now she lives in Maine with a barn full of rotting pianos. Which is to say, if there’s any artist or band that I’ll write about in this project who is the least likely to ever become dull and drab, no matter the level of their success, it’s Neko Case.
Now, there’s a contingent of Case purists who think that Furnace Room Lullaby is her best album; they want the honkytonk princess preserved, make no mistake about that. Myself, I prefer the country noir/southern gothic version of Case—she’s in full bloom on the album that follows this one, 2003’s Blacklisted—who peeks out from behind the curtains on this album. Between the alt-country ragers, the girl who told scariest stories at slumber parties can still make your hair stand on end with her haunting voice.
Now, it would be the easy way out to pick the best of those songs to share, the album’s title track. But, that would be cheating!
There was a time, sometime between 1998 and 2002, that Neko Case toured the crap out of the songs on Furnace Room Lullaby, and the ones that would end up on her next album, Blacklisted. I must have seen her four or five (maybe six?) times in those four years. Her transformation as a performer and songwriter in that span of time was amazing to watch; I was at her Austin City Limits taping in 2003, too (as a matter of fact, you can see me in most of the crowd cutaways) — and of course she was one of the first people I saw once I got to NYC, in a positively bizarre and celeb-studded show at Jazz at Lincoln Center in early 2007.
Anyway, for a long time, Case consistently opened live sets with today’s selection, “Twist the Knife,” the opening lines delivered like a banshee’s wail, straining many a flimsy PA. I’d forgotten all about this, but listening to Furnace Room Lullaby all the way through for the first time in ages, I had goosebumps all over again — the beauty and power of her voice as fresh and compelling as the first time I heard her wail “Tenderly, tenderly, please take my breath from me, into the fountains and up from the graves.”
Now, I haven’t spent much time with her latest, Middle Cyclone; the tough thing is, Neko Case’s albums are made for night driving, and I don’t have much call to do that kind of thing anymore. So I haven’t had a proper initiation period with that album complete with several ill-advised road trips. Pity. But tonight, I’ve remembered that sometimes you don’t always need to be moving to get the most out of her albums. Sometimes, you just need a cool night and a waxing moon to realize that you might be just fine to set still for a bit.
