{"id":265682,"date":"2025-09-30T05:10:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-30T05:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/265682\/"},"modified":"2025-09-30T05:10:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T05:10:11","slug":"neko-case-neon-grey-midnight-green-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/265682\/","title":{"rendered":"Neko Case: Neon Grey Midnight Green Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

To kick off her recent memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, Neko Case<\/a> steps into the shoes of her younger self, about to perform a dive bar gig that, as far as her nerves are concerned, might as well be the Super Bowl halftime show. \u201cMy job at that moment is to conjure a small dust devil of unreality around us, to pull it up out of a sticky, shiny carpet and flappy, beer-soaked speaker cones,\u201d she writes. \u201cI have to make it out of words and sounds and looks.\u201d<\/p>\n

So has been her ethos for the past three decades. At this point it feels wrong to call Case a country artist when her work most closely resembles a feral strain of baroque pop\u2014Nilsson<\/a> at a truck stop, Kate Bush<\/a> running with raccoons as well as<\/a> foxes. Her new album, Neon Grey Midnight Green, arriving right on the heels of her book, is something of a career retrospective, but it is also the 55-year-old Case at her most immediate and daring. Her last foray into autobiographical songwriting<\/a> plunged into darkness and excavated the muck; Neon Grey sprouts upwards, pushing a newfound wonder for life\u2019s mysteries up through the grass for all to see.<\/p>\n

The album\u2019s title, taken from the meeting of slate-colored clouds and conifer forests on the Pacific Northwest skyline, conjures up the familiar sense of vengeance and foreboding found across Case\u2019s other releases. But its overwhelming feelings are gratitude and awestruck revelation. \u201cI\u2019m a meteor shattering around you\/And I\u2019m sorry\/I\u2019ve become a solar system\/Since I found you,\u201d she declares on lead single \u201cWreck.\u201d Neon Grey was made in collaboration with the 20-piece PlainsSong Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Sara Parkinson and arranged by Tom Hagerman, and recorded live with the full band. The result is at once all-encompassing and strikingly intimate. In the past, Case\u2019s crystalline voice stood alone against the foggy, widescreen neo-noir of songs like \u201cDeep Red Bells<\/a>\u201d and \u201cCurse of the I-5 Corridor<\/a>.\u201d Amid all the strings and woodwinds and harps, bolstered by the usual guitars and brush-tapped drums, her heartfelt lyricism manifests as one massive floodlight, daring you to gaze straight-on.<\/p>\n

Case has spoken<\/a> about losing several close friends and colleagues in the years since 2018\u2019s Hell-On<\/a>, including longtime collaborator Peter Moore and Dexter Romweber of Flat Duo Jets, her favorite band. The latter inspired the beautiful \u201cWinchester Mansion of Sound,\u201d retelling a day spent together walking along train tracks. Case\u2019s emotion for him is raw and effusive, until she snaps back to the present to steer her audience away from clich\u00e9: \u201cIf you think I\u2019m talkin\u2019 \u2019bout romance\/You\u2019re not listening.\u201d She backtracks over herself in these asides and run-ons and revisions, including in the music itself, which frequently changes tempo partway through a song to match the cadence of Case\u2019s memories. The concept of time, via tidal waves or ticking clocks or a spider building its web, reappears across the album like an urgent spectre. That\u2019s the double-edged sword of grief\u2014debilitating as it may be, it can drive a person toward a more fervent truth-telling, a need to lay out exactly who or what was lost and make certain it is not forgotten. If Hell-On was Case\u2019s plea to heed the warnings of nature and the changing planet, Neon Grey is a grand eulogy for lives she\u2019s already said goodbye to, including versions of her own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To kick off her recent memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, Neko Case steps…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":265683,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[1939,171,975,67,132,68,1940],"class_list":{"0":"post-265682","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-albums","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us","14":"tag-web"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115291529274812549","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265682\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}