Bloodshot Records
Release date: August 20, 2002

On her third album, Blacklisted, Neko Case finally invents herself. Her last album, Furnace Room Lullaby, was a straight torch-and-twang affair, attracting all the obvious (and warranted) k.d. lang comparisons that come with that. Her vocal work on The New Pornographers self-titled debut showed us another Neko Case entirely - the voice that had so recently been weighed down with thick drawl and forced yodeling now rang clear, pinning together fierce pop-rock songs. Now on Blacklisted, she divides herself (and maybe her audience) yet again, casting off almost all of the country theatrics that made her a name only two years ago. She has relaxed for this album, keeping things a bit on the country side, but determined not to lay it on too thick this time; and in doing so, she has found a completely new and distinctive style. This is, of course, the ultimate goal for a singer-songwriter. She's reached it. This is an excellent album.

Blacklisted is, above all else, a triumph of delicate, late-night moodiness. Case has a long, dark highway in the back of her mind, and even while the songs are usually short and occasionally incomplete (the album packs 14 tracks into 38 minutes), the expansive production together with the evocative not-quite-country instrumentation of Calexico and other friends blows the sound up to occupy a huge amount of empty and lonely space. The ensemble playing only serves to accentuate the alone-ness at the center of the music, which is a neat trick - even with talent as large as Howe Gelb on board, everything points toward Neko herself, and her lyrical sensibilities, spare and solid and introspective.

For newcomers to Case, of which this album will surely breed many, her most immediately striking talent isn't her voice, clean and sharp as it is. It's the lyrics. Nothing on either of her last two records even hinted at the poetry she had in her — a dense, frighteningly evocative matte of dark words, sung plainly enough to be startling. Gone are songs about Wal-Mart, replaced with lyrics like "it looks a lot like engine oil / and tastes like being poor and small / and Popsicles in summer." (On second thought, that could be about Wal-Mart after all, or a score of other things.) On "Outro with Bees," she sings, "red wine is fast / at the lip of your glass / saying 'I'm gonna ruin everything.'" She's sticking to a country-western iconography here - drinking, driving, etc. - but in execution, she's creating something quite apart from mere country. Where many a singer-songwriter would be content to let the obvious speak for itself, Case keeps you leaning into the speaker for more meaning, and more words.