Neko Case
Neon Grey Midnight Green
ANTI-
Neko Case’s eighth album arrives after her longest gap between solo records, though she’s filled that time with a heart-melting memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, and the Wild Creatures career-highlights-on-shuffle retrospective. Seven years on from 2018’s Hell-On, Case has rebuilt her house and studio after a wildfire, played with The New Pornographers again for two albums, and even started writing a musical adaptation of Thelma & Louise. When placed against its predecessor, Neon Grey Midnight Green settles into each scene with more purposeful insights; Hell-On was released when Case was picking up the pieces of her life, while she now has more perspective on her past.
Neon Grey Midnight Green’s production feels heavy with atmospheric details beyond the instrumentation, with Case adding a wash of color from her favorite Northwest skyline to each violin flurry, guitar strum, group-vocal harmony, clarinet curlicue, and heartbeat drumbeat. Her brushes with anxieties and existential dread that she unfurled from the past in her lovely memoir still hang in the air like a heavy fog. This is a full-length that wonders and never wanders—Neon Grey Midnight Green is the musical equivalent of that brain-to-heart connection you feel in nature when the colors coalesce into strange new combinations as summer gives way to fall.
“Destination” begins the album with warm soundcheck blues where the band and a mini orchestra stretch out as Case waxes poetic on a wide variety of topics. Her voice has a touch of melancholy and also a triumphant push toward blossoming romance. “Winchester Mansion of Sound,” “Baby I’m Not (A Werewolf),” and “Rusty Mountain” flesh out this fuller, orchestrated sound quite well later on the LP. Once Case starts building up these tracks to include harp, flute, strings, and French horns, she’s in her element with the wind at her back. She’s also deep in her usual pocket of the country-rock universe on the waltzing piano ballad “Little Gears,” singing about all of us craving a little wildness.
Neon Grey Midnight Green also has its moments of pure abstract musical memoir such as “Tomboy Gold,” which features Case in Tom Waits–like Beat-poetry mode over dueling saxophones. Elsewhere, a barroom piano song like “Louise” is just resplendent, as Case’s lyrics speak of lazy love in the moody lights. It’s pleasing to see Case attempt to sing about love here, since she usually finds the subject futile (see “Rusty Mountain,” wherein she sings with defiance: “We all deserve better than some love song”). Case has shared a history of pain with loved ones that squirms just under the surface, and Neon Grey Midnight Green cracks open old wounds to let the infection loose.
The terrifying fury of love and loss are on full display on Neon Grey Midnight Green even in its last song, “Match-Lit.” The closing number is about Case’s dear friend Dallas Good, who passed away suddenly in 2022. Case knew the singer-guitarist for 20 years, with his outfit The Sadies serving as her backing band on her 2004 live record The Tigers Have Spoken. The end of the album basks in the glow of love, which can burn out as quickly as a lit match. Case always captures that wistful and animal magnetism of raw love, even when she kicks against traditionalism.
