[rating=8.00]
Hearing Neko Case’s voice feels like coming home again. It is all at once powerfully singular and familiar, but still mysterious and bewildering in its beauty. A new Neko Case record is like a gift with endless layers to unwrap, and Hell-On – her first since 2013’s The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You – is no exception. Filled with guest vocals from powerful female vocalists like Beth Ditto, former bandmates k.d. lang and Laura Veirs, and usual backup singers Kelly Hogan and Nora O’Connor, Hell-On finds Case embracing an even more collaborative spirit than we’re used to when it comes to her solo records. While it is her voice that ultimately cuts through and stays with you, it would not be true to the album to call it a solo venture.
As fans of Case’s intricate songwriting and storytelling can attest, she is a master at weaving folkloric tales and creating multi-dimensional characters and narratives. Hell-On puts that skill on display cleanly and against catchy pop hooks – maybe more pop-heavy than any Case record to date. Themes of humans as animals and nature overtaking run wild, as do larger questions about the universe, feminism, and old wives’ tales. What or who is God? Why do we buy into the idea of luck? “Bad Luck” is a zippy, retro pop song about the tropes of good fortune and superstition, and the album’s title track is a noirish exploration of spirituality sang like a haunting lullaby.
Hell-On is packed with heroines and odes to them. On “Halls of Sarah” (with help from Veirs, Hogan and Rachel Flotard and the warm vibration of a baritone saxophone), Case reaches 80s pop heights singing about the exhausting expectations and pressures put on women through the story of one. It is one of Hell-On’s most enchanting standouts. “Winnie” looks at the way women are historically worshipped and idealized by soldiers looking for something to hope for in the world. “I looked off the edge of the world/I saw the girl that changed everything/That’s when I met Winnie/I wanted to be her sailor’s tattoo,” she sings.
And on “Curse of the I-5 Corridor”, a duet with Mark Lanegan, Case looks back on the naivety of youth, a smoky world full of “reverb leaking out of tavern doors and not knowing how the sounds were made.” She writes about getting older with equal parts wisdom and fear, singing “I’m so scared about mystery/I fear I smell exctinction in the folds of this Novocain age coming on.” “I fucked every man that I wanted to be,” she says. “I was so stupid then.”
Case recorded the album in the midst of chaos in her life. Her Vermont home burned down while she was overseas, leaving her helpless and untethered. Yet Hell-On remains a controlled, polished album with careful arrangements of twangy pop and lush folk rock. Seven records in, Case is still creating something interesting and different.
