CD Review: Fox Confessor Brings the Flood by Neko Case

By CC Staff

I am going to try to review this CD as impartially as I can, but I doubt that I will be able to hold back my intense fan girl love for it. This is easily in my top five favorite albums of all time, if not my very favorite.

Neko Case is sort of a legend in the alt-country genre for her versatility and “country noir” sensibilities. Fox Confessor Brings the Flood is her best album; confident, moving, and even playful at times in it’s almost punk-like disregard for the conventions of structure. Her soulful voice recalls spirituals and blues but her lyrics are rich and modern in their abstraction.

This is one of those rare albums that I can listen to all the way through. It feels like taking a journey down a long dirt country road, peaceful, tumultuous at times, but starkly beautiful and rich.

More than that, this is the singular album that appeals to me as I transition fully into adulthood and womanhood–I understand everything she sings about, even if I can’t follow every line. She evokes the way I feel about this time in my life with her music as much as she does with her words, sad guitars that recall nostalgia and stark echoes that convey loneliness better, I think, than any lyrics ever could.

The album starts out hauntingly, with the twangy “Margaret Vs. Pauline”. It establishes the theme of being the “other” girl, and that stinging feeling of being overlooked and never quite feeling good enough. This is echoed in my favorite song on the album, “Hold On, Hold On” with the lyrics “In the end I was the mean girl/Or somebody’s in-between girl/Now it’s the devil I love/And that’s as funny as real love”.

Case was also the producer on this album and you can tell with the time she takes on each song, enunciating each lovely syllable to make sure every part has it’s appropriate level of attention and emotion. Every song has somewhat of an ominous, almost Southern Gothic timbre and that is one of the things that makes the album so intriguing. It is not an album for casual listening: it does what great literature or film does. It moves.

Other highlights on the album include “Star Witness”, the titular “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood” “That Teenage Feeling” and “The Needle Has Landed”.