I'm starting to think that The New Pornographers are slowly taking over my music collection. The way they're doing this is subtle - luring me in backwards with the work of a few solo artists who belong to the musical collective, and then convincing me to go back a few years and track down the latest albums that the group's got to offer. Brand new albums by group members A. C. Newman and Neko Case both graced record shelves in early 2009, and while I was quite taken with Newman's work, Case was the clincher. It was something about the clear, confident, and ever-so-slightly sassy tone of her voice that hooked me, in combination with her largely folksy, classic-rock infused sound that convinced me I should eventually check out the New Pornos as a group. Anything that combined these two songsmiths had to be pretty good, right? Well, I'll have to answer that question later on, because first I want to deal with Middle Cyclone, the latest Neko Case record, which held a ton of promise and brightened my day quite a bit at first, only to come up a bit empty when I listened to it more frequently and carefully. While enough to get me hooked, it ultimately hasn't convinced me that Case is as strong on her own as Newman.

I'll start with the positive aspects, since those were the first things to jump out at me. Middle Cyclone poses itself as a force of nature, a bold leap forward, which is an image reinforced by the cover photo, featuring Neko poised barefoot on the hood of a car, wielding a sword, no less. The opening moments of the record, with its graceful and yet intense folk/rock sound, come through on this promise by throwing us into the dead center of a whirlwind of imaginative ideas. Throughout the record, the influences of 60's-era classic rock and 70's era soft rock merge with the occasionally more abstract sensibilities of modern indie music, and the light, breezy texture of it all can easily tickle the ear of any new listener. Case's lyrics are ominous, almost threatening in some moments, and yet in other moments, she's a vulnerable little girl simply confessing the need to be loved. There's a lot to dig into in terms of lyrics as she bounces back and forth between the innocent, swooning maiden and the furious woman scorned. So far, so good. This puts Case into the category of "thoughtful" artists whose lyrics are potentially a window into the soul, who make me ask, "Hmmm, I wonder what she was going through when she wrote this one".

Somewhere around the fifth or sixth listen, though, it all started to evaporate. Suddenly Middle Cyclone began to seem like a mere tropical storm that would rain on and off in fits and starts - the highlights were beyond obvious and highly memorable, but a lot of the moments in between were to slight too fully register. Songs began to bleed into one another in my mind, with a seeming ellipsis connecting one to the next, and several thoughts or musical ideas seeming to not be fully realized. This started to frustrate me  as I realized that my initial love for the album had more to do with its sound and overall mood than with the quality of individual songs. And it made for an interesting comparison with Newman's Get Guilty, an album where the sound wasn't necessarily my favorite thing genre-wise, but the songs were so consistent that I came close to giving it a five-star rating. Case's album, despite having a better voice and a musical style that I tended to prefer, now found itself slipping from a "low four stars" to a "high three stars". And that's where Middle Cyclone sits now - in the unassuming middle. I can't point out any bad songs here (maybe an iffy one or two), but the overall effect of so many slight, lilting folk songs, only occasionally punctuated by something a bit more out of the box that almost threatens to interrupt the flow, is that I start to lose my focus whenever I attempt to listen from beginning to end. (I mean the end of the actual songs, not the sleep-inducing final track. But we'll get to that part later.)

This Tornado Loves You
I have waited with a glacier's patience
Smashed every transformer with every trailer
'Til nothing was standing, sixty-five miles wide
Still you are nowhere, still you are nowhere, nowhere in sight...
Neko pretty much has me at "hello" with this up-tempo, lush, folk/rock song about an undying love declared in the worst way possible. With an achingly gorgeous (and ever-so-slightly twisted) melody, she declares herself to be a tornado, which will stop at nothing, cutting a wide swath of destruction that leaves no friend or family member unharmed as she tries to win over the man who has spurned her. It's a moment of twisted genius, full of little instrumental flourishes and the steady, quick beat of light drums that shuffle along like a train chugging at full speed to avoid the oncoming twister. I have to sigh when I realize that if only the rest of the album had been this brilliant, we'd have a contender for album of the year on our hands.

The Next Time You Say Forever
And that's a dirty, fallow feeling
To be the dangling ceiling
From when the roof came crashing down...
The absolute worst way to follow up a stellar opening track is with a second song that pretty much slams on the brakes and does little to be memorable, serving as an ill-conceived bridge between better songs. Aside from the intriguing music box noises at the beginning, this one's mostly just generic guitar strumming (with a few strings here and there) that rushes by too quickly to make an impression. It's basically an attempt to call a guy's bluff - he's making all sorts of false promises that he'll commit to her for the long run, and she's heard that story before and doesn't want to hear it again. "The next time you say forever, I will punch you in your face", she remarks. This song really needs more attitude - and more time to unfold into something more blunt and frustrated - than its brief running time of 1:46 could possibly allow.

People Got a Lotta Nerve
We know they call them killer whales
But you seemed surprised when it pinned you down
To the bottom of the tank where you can't turn around...
This track's problem is the polar opposite of the previous one - good music wasted on dumb lyrics, rather than good lyrics wasted on dull music. The electric guitars ring out with old-school folk/rock goodness, almost echoing the melody of a classic song like "Turn! Turn! Turn!" And it's got one of the catchiest melodies on the album, well-supported by Neko's full, beautiful voice. The attitude I longed for in the previous song is here in full force, as she tries to tell a guy she can't be held responsible for destroying him when he was warned well ahead of time that "I'm a man, man, man-eater". See, that part's a great hook. But I can't keep a straight face once I hear the follow-up line, "Still you're surprised, prised, prised, when I eat ya". That's about the laziest trick in the songwriting book, to rhyme "eater" with "eat ya". It feels like she's dragging out similar-sounding words here due to a lack of additional things to say - a theory which is supported by another disappointingly short track length. At 2:34, this one winds down just as I feel like it's really gaining steam.

Polar Nettles
She is the centrifuge that throws the spires from the sun
The Sistine Chapel painted with the Gatling gun...
Case meanders a bit more on this amorphous track which starts off as a piano ballad with its dark chord progression and moody electric guitars slowly bleeding into the mix. Midway through, its tempo shifts and it seems to take on a completely different identity, as a finger-picked folk song. The lyrics are poetic and intriguing all the way through, but it feels like a forced attempt to tie together separate musical ideas, neither of which were fleshed out enough to form a complete song in their own right. (This is true even though the repeated chorus of "Someday soon" comes around each time - there's not much time to really establish a grounding motif here due to yeat another instance of a song petering out at the two-and-a-half minute mark.)

Vengeance Is Sleeping
If you're not run-out, dead and buried
You're most certifiably married...
Finally, Neko's back on solid ground with a gorgeous acoustic ballad that has the good sense to stick with the memorable melody and rhythm that it establishes right away. The finger-picking in this song is stellar, with light piano backing her up as she sings ominously through a trance-like, minor-key verse that keeps looping back on itself. There's a sense of foreboding here despite the beauty (which seems to be true of Neko's best songs in general) - she curiosly declares "I'm not the man you thought I was" and goes back to her apparent favorite theme of a love that wouldn't cooperate and that had to be forecfully coerced into cooperating. The song lives in a haunted, echoing space where just the right amount of background vocals and production tricks can be used to make it memorable without it sounding overproduced.

Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth
Grasp at straws that don't want grasping
Gaze at clouds that come down crashing...
Neko digs deep to come up with this cover song, originally performed by the band Sparks in the 70's. While I can't speak to the quality of the original recording, this version is stellar despite its short length, and sounds like it could have easily been recorded in that era, due to the "soft rock" quality, the richness of the melody, and the way that the background vocalists chime in. It's one of the albums shortest songs (Case seems to favor brevity whenever possible), but this is likely an artifact of the original version being short as well, so I can't fault her for that aspect of it. Really, there's nothing to criticize here. It's beautifully sung, it fits in perfectly with the theme of nature vs. human nature that permeates the record, and it's hella fun to sing along to. (Fun side note - I was racking my brain, trying to figure out where I'd heard of Sparks before, and then I remembered that Weird Al Yankovic had done a sort of "style parody" of the band with his song "Virus Alert". Which is awesome, but a completely different type of music than this, so I'm really curious about what the original "Mother Earth" sounded like now.)

Middle Cyclone
I can't give up actin' tough
It's all that I'm made of
Can't scrape together quite enough
To ride the bus to the outskirts of the fact that I need love...
OK, so you theme your album around the concept of dangerous windstorms and other forces of nature, and then this is the title track you come up with? Songs like this illustrate the side of Neko Case that I just don't understand. With a loosely defined rhythm, a light guitar strum that stops and starts at odd intervals, and some other snatches of background vocals and odd music box sounds (hey, a recurring motif!), this one feels like a whimper when it should have been a roar. Neko does the quiet, folksy thing well, and a track like this could potentially be a standout if she didn't have so many of 'em. I can dig some great poetic nuggets out of this one - particularly in the vulnerable confessions of a woman coming to grips with her need for love - but the off-kilter time signature ruins whatever "stick-in-your-head" quality this song might have otherwise had.

Fever
I caught his words in my open mouth
I gagged and choked and spit them out
I heard him turn as he did hear
My tiny heartbeat in his ear...
Here's another excellent example of Case's musical ADHD rendering a song impotent that had the potential to be memorable. I love the drum and bass groove (complete with weird, wobbly sound effects) that she establishes at the beginning of this song. It breaks from the lilting folk of most of the rest of the album, even though it's still acoustic at its heart (and there's nothing wrong with that). But this only lasts for a verse, before the 4/4 groove sneakily morphs into a breezy 6/8. I like songs that are in 6/8 time (or 3/4 or whatever you want to call it.) But Neko has a ton of 'em on this album, which makes it hard to tell the difference between a lot of 'em at first or second glance. The lyrics are mildly interesting here - they seem to be a veiled swipe at a man who just wants to take advantage of a pretty face who can sing and play the guitar. The song's full of several other analogies that I don't fully understand, involving bugs and birds and so forth. Again, the song falls apart before I feel like I can fully get into it.

Magpie to the Morning
Take your own advice
'Cause thunder and lightning gets you rain
Run an airtight mission, a Cousteau expedition
Find a diamond at the bottom of the drain...
The "dove" mentioned in the previous song provides a good segue into this song, which is all about magpies and mockingbirds, the seeming symbols of morning and evening. While this is one of the many "skip along in 6/8 time" songs on the record, this one stands out to me a little more due to its easy going combo of acoustic guitar, upright bass, and drums, with an interesting break for a jazzy electric guitar solo. It sounds like the sort of thing you'd have heard in a cofeehouse 30 or 40 years ago. For me, that's a good quality. I kind of wish this one had been given more time to allow more of the players involved to add solos or other little flourishes - it too runs the risk of feeling like it's not fully formed, as what seems to be the song's bridge actually takes it to its abrupt end, before three full minutes are up. But that's not as big of a complaint here as it is elsewhere.

I'm an Animal
You could say it's my instinct
Yes, I still have one
There's no time to second guess it
Yes, there are things that I'm still so afraid of...
It's been several tracks since Neko's done something truly upbeat, so from the pounding drums and the light but driving guitar strum that open this song, you'd expect this to be one of the more attitude-heavy songs, especially given the title, which hints at something more primal. Unfortunately (I'm starting to sound like a broken record, I'm sure), this one similarly proceeds to shoot itself in the foot, with a chorus that doesn't declare itself strongly enough to really make the song stand out (it wants to ring out strongly, but the background vocals are weak and the thing doesn't repeat enough times), and lyrics that seems to be all over the place, rather than fleshing out her "animal" metaphor in any sort of satisfying way. ("Heaven will smell like the airport?" Seriously, WTF?) It's over in a whopping 2 minutes and 22 seconds. If this is the closest we can come to a "rocker" in Case's world, then maybe she shouldn't bother with the up-tempo stuff at all, but then, we had "This Tornado Loves You", so I don't know why she keeps holding back elsewhere.

Prison Girls
Prison girls are not impressed
They're the ones who have to clean this mess
They've traded more for cigarettes
Than I've managed to express...
This track seems to stick out like a sore thumb amidst all of the lightweight folk songs that surround it - it rings out immediately with its somber, downcast electric guitar melody and its sulking, slow tempo. It's got a sullen but steady groove to it that doesn't seem like much at first, but it's one of the scant few tracks on the album that is actually given time to feel fully cooked. (Shockingly, Neko sticks with this mood and rhythm for a full five and a half minutes - which is more than twice the length of half the tracks on the album!) However convoluted and oblique the lyrics may be (the repeated line "I love your long shadows and your gunpowder eyes" is especially puzzling), it's an incredibly well-produced number with strings plucking in the background and Neko's melody turning interesting corners on several occasions. This song, like some of the better ones she's contributed to The New Pornographers' albums, knows its way around a complex chord progression, and isn't a fraid to use that trick to build itself into something more than what you'd expect from the first few bars. The only downside here is that this track honestly feels like it got dropped in from the sessions for a previous album or something. Stylistically, it doesn't fit into Middle Cyclone at all.

Don't Forget Me
In the summer, by the poolside
While the fireflies are all around you
I'll miss you when I'm lonely
I'll miss the alimony, too...
Now here's a sad bar tune if I've ever heard one. It's also lovely, in its own quiet way. Case is once again reaching back into deacdes past to pay tribute to what is presumably an old favorite song - this one was originally recorded in the 70's by Swedish-American singer/songwriter Harry Nilsson. It's a tribute to a relationship that seemingly went south, one which pleads for a breakup to be amicable and for each person to remember the other when they get old. The vaguely jazzy piano treatment makes it feel an awful lot like something that Over the Rhine might come up with, especially if their Drunkard's Prayer album had turned out to be about the dissolution of a marriage rather than a marriage saved at the nick of time.

The Pharoahs
I listened in when you thought you were alone
Calling the Sphinx on a tornado's form
Who knows what you meant
I only heard what I wanted...
Case goes back into lyrically oblique mode with yet another lightly skipping acoustic song in triple meter, this one accentuated slightly by what sounds like a harpsichord or a zither or whatever that plucked string instrument is that gives it a slightly "medieval" feel despite the overall folk/rock style. It's another in a long line of songs about love turning into disappointment, as Neko comes to the realization that "there are no pharoahs, only men" when one realtionship after the next fails. That's my best interpretation fo a song that vascillates back and forth between dense analogies and throaway lines such as "You kept me wanting, wanting, wanting, like the wanting in the movies" which honestly seem a bit lazy. This one also has a solid chorus melody, but the rhythm does this weird "hiccup" on the way there that kind of screws up the verse. I'm not sure what's up with the weird "carnival music" at the end of this one - at this point it sounds like anything goes in terms of the weird, whimsical sounds that Neko feels like tacking onto her otherwise simple folk songs.

Red Tide
I remember because of the fires that leapt 
From the caves of the things that have not happened yet
When I think of it now, they smell to me quite sinister...
Seriously? We've come all this way through an album full of songs that have often struggled to get above a certain number of bpm's, and now we're going to end with a chiming, upbeat, electric tune? This sort of thing should have come much earlier in the tracklisting, to break up some of the all-over-the-place-ness of it all. But whatever. We've got another interesting and slightly "bent" melody in play, along with some blurting sax and a stomping rhythm and one of Neko's gutsier vocal performances. The album (or at least the musical portion of it) comes crashing to a close with this odd tale of the tide coming in and the mollusks and other weird-smelling sea creatures winning the day as the humans are apparently flooded out of their own homes."I hate the rain", she remarks not long before a final "Ah-ah-ah-ah" brings the album to a sudden end.

Marais la Nuit
BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!!! About a half hour more, to be exact. Apparently an advantage of recording so many brief songs is that, even with fourteen of 'em on your album, you've still got well over 30 minutes of dead space to fill. She accomplished this by leaving the secluded farmhouse in which Middle Cyclone was recorded, going down to a nearby marsh, and recording the insects chirping for about that length of time. See, I could accept this sort of thing as calming, as an uninterrupted snapshot of nature performing its own song, if it went on for a few minutes. Maybe even five minutes. And especially if the album had closed with a calm, dusky sort of song that bled perfectly into this spontaneously recorded reflection of Mother Nature's simple beauty. But instead, she chose to end with a rocker that abruptly cuts off, gives us 20 seconds or so of silent warning time to turn the darn thing off (because honestly, who's gonna listen to this all the way through more than once?), and then unloads half an hour of bug sounds on us. I actually listened to it all the way through, just to see if there was any variance, any animal calls or bird chirps or other serendipitious happy accidents caught on tape. It never varies. I promptly deleted the mp3 after that first time and I had almost forgotten it existed until now.

Well, I can't downgrade an album for indulging in a half hour of non-music when it's at the end, doesn't interrupt the flow of the rest of it, and is basically a bonus track (especially when my personal favorite band ended their first album with a half hour's worth of string section rehearsals). So that's not why Middle Cyclone gets a middling three-star grade from me. It's because the seeming wealth of material contained within the first fourteen tracks doesn't really carry a lot of weight when inspected more closely. Case has an apparent problem with second-guessing her own songs and shutting them down too quickly, or changing course midway through them, and that gives most of the album a feeling of, "Oh, it's this song. Remind me again why I'm supposed to care about this one?" And it's frustrating to get so impatient about an album that honestly does have a very beautiful sound to it overall. There's nothing to dislike about Case's preferred style, except that it often doesn't seem to match the emotional intensity of the songwriting. I feel like this could all be easily resolved if she allowed the songs to fully find themselves on her next album, to build up and explode with passion or anger when they needed, or to meditate for a little longer during the quieter moments. Clearly she has some sort of patience - or she wouldn't have sat quietly in a swamp with a tape recorder on for over thirty minutes. Here's hoping she allots a litle more of that patience to her own creative process next time around.

ALBUM WORTH:
This Tornado Loves You $2
The Next Time You Say Forever $0
People Got a Lotta Nerve $.50
Polar Nettles $.50
Vengeance Is Sleeping $1.50
Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth $1.50
Middle Cyclone $.50
Fever $.50
Magpie to the Morning $1
I'm an Animal $.50
Prison Girls $1
Don't Forget Me $1.50
The Pharoahs $1
Red Tide $1
Marais la Nuit $0
TOTAL: $13

Website: http://www.nekocase.com/

Recommended: Yes