Fox Confessor Brings The Flood

From MC6

Neko Case's new album, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, sounds as if it could be the soundtrack to an unmade David Lynch movie. Like Lumberton, USA of Blue Velvet or the woodsy Twin Peaks, her northern town's residents project an innocence, but there is an undercurrent of sorrow and danger that lurks around corners and in the back alleys.

In the opening track, Margaret vs. Pauline, Case contrasts how �??Everything's so easy for Pauline,�?� but �??Margaret is the fragments of a name...One left a sweater sitting on the train/And the other lost three fingers at the cannery.�?� In this town, one narrator's true love �??drowned in a dirty old pan of oil,�?� and one muses �??if death should smell my breathing/As it pass beneath my window/Let it lead me trembling.�?� Still another is comforted by her brave friend who is �??holding out for that teenage feeling,�?� but the heartache in Neko's voice betrays her lack of faith in ever finding it. This is country where the birds are not what they seem, and there's a near-shamanic connection with the Fox of the title track.

Case doesn't merely echo Lynch thematically. The overall sound of the record, like her previous Blacklisted (a desert island disc for me), takes a lot from the Angelo Badalementi-atmospherics of the Twin Peaks soundtrack. The droopy and shimmery guitars, dreamy harmonies and a nostalgic sound are what you'd expect from the jukebox at the Double-R Diner, but not necessarily a modern record. --TTop 12:27, 9 Apr 2006 (PDT)