Neko Case keeps pushing the frontier of her special blend of country rock to an expanse of thought-provoking songs and heartfelt performances. Her latest, Middle Cyclone, is perhaps her most satisfying mix.
Case’s crystal clear voice, so pure and with seemingly limitless range, delivers lyrics of vivid imagery sometimes mixed with metaphor (I have waited with a glacier’s patience, smashed every transformer with every trailer, ’til nothing was standing), sometimes with doses of hard-nosed reality (The next time you say forever, I’ll punch you in your face) over whirlwind muscianship. Her brand of country sounds rooted in the west rather than the south, and her songs stop short of radio-friendly hooks but exhibit beautiful melodies in unusual and creative constructions that invite revisiting after each listen.
The opening track, This Tornado Loves You, rushes at the listener like a lover running roughshod in search of her man. With rolling-wheel guitars sounding like banjos, Case and her band churn out a relentless chase over territory that belongs to the heart but evokes the wild center of a storm.
Whether using spare arrangements (many of the songs are co-arranged with her band’s guitarist Paul Rigby) as in The Next Time You Say Forever, Vengeance Is Sleeping and the title track, or with her full band on the uptempo People Got A Lotta Nerve, the ’50s feel of Fever or the waltz time Magpie To The Morning, the performances are sparkling and appropriate. Of the sparsely played tunes, Middle Cyclone is the most poignant with only voice, guitar and music box.
The haunting melodies of Polar Nettles and Prison Girls, with its droning guitar and pop sensibilities, stand apart starkly from much of the other material but still work perfectly. Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth (a tune by Sparks) plays like an anthem, the background vocals building to a wall of sound by the end. The track also shows Case’s tendency at times toward classical and Celtic sounding melody.
The lovely Harry Nilsson ballad Don’t Forget Me features a piano orchestra of eight players on second-hand pianos in various stages of disrepair, set up in a barn on Case’s Vermont property, where the album was recorded. The sound from the keyboards is drenched in echo as if it were coming from a vast canyon. Despite the funky surroundings of her farm as seen in a promotional video, or perhaps because of it, the album’s production matches the performances throughout – clear, full and distinct.
I’m An Animal is pushed by the driving beat of drummer Barry Mirochnick’s tom-toms on what is probably the album’s heaviest track. Case belts out The Pharaohs in a style reminscent of her tour de force Deep Red Bells from the album Blacklisted. She wrenches everything out of the melody’s sustained notes, sounding like a ringing bell, deep and vibrating. The closer, Red Tide, has Steve Berlin’s keyboard-generated sax section to propel the shuffle feel that Case glides over. There is actually one more cut, more than 31 minutes, of outdoor sounds, either crickets or frogs, Marais La Nuit.
One quibble I have with Case is the length of many of her songs. They’re so short, one clocking in at 1:46 (The Next Time You Say Forever) with most in the two-to-three minute range with the exception of Prison Girls (5:26). This is pretty standard for Case and sometimes I feel a song is not completely developed when it ends or I’m left wanting more of it. But I suppose that’s a good thing. Because that’s what this album does. Makes you want more.
The Remains were known for their intense live shows and I was lucky enough to see them twice, once in their neighborhood and once as the opening act for the Beatles at Shea Stadium on the Fab Four’s last tour (1966) of the States.
I’ve been to quite a few concerts over the years, many influential, some inspiring. The earliest big venue shows were in the fall of 1965, both at the New Haven Arena. In early November, it was the Rolling Stones with Brian Jones on second guitar in the wake of their summer mega-hit Satisfaction. The Stones sounded and looked great, but it was a relatively sedate performance compared with ones for which the band became infamous. A side note on the Stones show is that the first time they were booked for the Arena, the summer of ’64, the show was actually canceled because of insufficient ticket sales. Amazing. The second show, the Beach Boys with Brian Wilson on bass, on Thanksgiving Day. The Boys wore yellow short-sleeved oxford shirts with gray slacks, not their customary black-and-white and white khakis (I guess because it was a holiday) and with Brian in the fold sounded like angels. Two rather different groups but both rode the singles charts and that’s what drove the music industry at the time.
He’s also known to be, at times, a tempermental live artist. I saw him play at Lake Compounce in Bristol, CT in the early ’90s when that venue put on concerts. The highlight of the show was when Morrison wasn’t even on stage. At the time, jazz-pop vocalist Georgie Fame, who had several worldwide hits in the ’60s including Yeh, Yeh and The Ballad Of Bonnie & Clyde, was leading Van’s band. Fame came out alone and played two songs accompanying himself on Hammond B-3, Willie Dixon’s I Love The Life I Live in a Mose Allison style and Yeh, Yeh, both outstanding solo renditions. Van then came out, played a 50-minute set, left the stage and did not return despite a standing ovation.
Below is a rather long excerpt from an even longer note about the creation of the Blind Faith cover by Bob Seidemann, the photographer who came up with the concept and shot the model holding the “spaceship.” To read the entire note you can go 
If you think the cover was an alarming image, check out this cover to the band’s tour program with a nude covered by her long hair in all the vital places blind-folded and on a crucifix.
We asked her what her fee should be for modeling, she said a young horse. I called the image ‘Blind Faith’ and Clapton made that the name of his band. When the cover was shown in the trades it hit the market like a runaway train, causing a storm of controversy. At one point the record company considered not releasing the cover at all. It was Eric Clapton who fought for it. If this was not to be the cover, there would be no record. It was Eric who elected to not print the name of the band on the cover. This had never been done before. The name was printed on the wrapper, when the wrapper came off, so did the type.
Imara George stopped singing, although her partner keyboard player Greg Kurstin continued vamping on the chords of the intro, and asked, “Are you all right?” Then when she’d seen he recovered, she laughed and the audience broke into laughter as well. She said, “I didn’t mean to laugh but after he said he was all right, I realized it was kind of funny. Don’t worry I do shit like that all the time.” More laughter. Then she repeated the opening line of Ray Gun from their latest release Ray Guns Are Not Just The Future and was fully immersed in their set, a wonderful mix of pop/rock melodies ladened with jazz sensibilities and George’s sense of humor.
Beck, acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest guitar players, has had a varied career that started in earnest with the Yardbirds, replacing Eric Clapton, through two versions of the blues-rock based Jeff Beck Group and on to a long run at the forefront of fusion music. When Beck made the transition to jazz-rock in the ’70s, he finally started garnering appropriate accolades for his prowess. As the guitarist in the Yardbirds, he was well-known to the general public in England but not so much in the States. Still, as early as the mid-’60s he was experimenting with extraordinary sounds on the guitar before many of the decade’s guitar heroes, including Jimi Hendrix, who cited Beck as an influence.
They had performed together in early 2007 at an English festival, Clapton joining Winwood’s touring band, and later that summer at Clapton’s Crossroads Festival in Chicago. Their set, which closed the event, had Winwood this time playing with Clapton’s band. It’s all documented on the DVD of the festival, and it’s a spectacular performance by both.
I had only become acquainted with her music in the mid-1990s, but Elias, from Brazil, had been around on the jazz scene in this country since at least the mid- ’80s, playing at times with her then-husband Randy Brecker of the Brecker Brothers. I loved her mix of bossa nova and bebop with a classical base that she infused in standards, U.S. and Brazilian, and her compositions. Her playing has always combined astounding technique with a unique feel that so wonderfully blends American jazz leanings with strong latin influences.