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Concert reviews Music

Neko Case at the Dakota

NEKO CASE at Dakota Tavern, Tuesday August 27. Rating: NNNN


I’m a longtime Neko Case fan (I used to go see her at the Horseshoe Tavern in the early 2000s) but Tuesday’s industry and friends-only private showcase at Dakota was by far the most intimate show I’ve ever seen the songwriter do.

Backed – as always – by Kelly Hogan, as well as an accompanying guitarist/pianist, Case was previewing songs from her ninth album, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You (out next week on Anti-).

It wasn’t clear whether it was the songs, or the small attentive crowd (or a mixture of both) that made Case appear a little nervous, but the quiet room and the bare-bones arrangements allowed for an almost total focus on the songs and on Case’s and Hogan’s vocal interplay (Hogan is able to make her voice sound like that of a few different backup singers, depending on what suits the song).

The vocal arrangements on The Worse Things Get are playful, but the lyrical subject matter gets strikingly serious and dark. Case introduced Night Still Comes, for example, as being a song “about being bat shit crazy”, while a cappella Nearly Midnight, Honolulu’s about witnessing a kid being sworn at and told to shut up by their mom.

As if to lighten the mood, Case played a couple tunes off Canadian Amp by Mike O’Neill Andy and Lisa Marr and Case and Hogan paid habitual compliments to Canada.

It felt like the audience was being granted a rare window into a more vulnerable, exposed side of the big-voiced, sometimes jocular singer-songwriter – near the end of the performance, Hogan reached over and squeezed Case’s hand – but the new songs are beautiful, experimental, quotidian and profound.

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