Neko Case : Neon Grey Midnight Green
Neko Case spent the seven years since her last album, 2018’s Hell-On, in a state of reflection. In 2022, she released the best-of compilation Wild Creatures, featuring material that spanned from her early years releasing records as Neko Case & Her Boyfriends on up to the present, showcasing two decades of evolution as a songwriter and performer, but presented in non-chronological order. Earlier this year, she released her memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, which reached back even farther into her traumatic childhood, emancipation at just 15 years old, and simply learning how to survive. But the work on her next album coincided with a tragic string of deaths of people in her life—peers, collaborators, friends and those who were more like family to her than anyone.
In “Destination,” the first song on Neon Grey Midnight Green, she pours some of her most breathtaking turns of phrase into a dual-edged tribute to those who’ve passed and a celebration of life. Opening with light twinkles of piano, “Destination” builds up to a blockbuster ballad, catalyzing grief into a deeply moving statement of wonder and affection: “Someday this one horse town will pull itself out of the station to follow you around—you’re the real destination.” It’s as epic a journey as she’s ever embarked on in a solitary song, but it leads somewhere increasingly intimate, heartbreaking and heartwarming in equal measure as she offers flowers to those who deserved more: “Most of all I love you because you don’t pretend it doesn’t hurt/Waiting for the world to catch up and see you for your worth.”
Neon Grey Midnight Green is a sprawling and ambitious record that juxtaposes emotional highs with disorienting detours, as if to mirror the off-kilter rhythm of life itself. Right after the early peak in “Destination,” Case drops in the sub-two-minute headtrip segue “Tomboy Gold,” which is less a song than a hallucinogenic jazz poem. And yet, listening to the songs out of order, as I mistakenly did at first, only reveals how masterful Case is in her sequencing, pulling us back out of the Black Lodge intermission into the pop immediacy of “Wreck,” the song here that most closely aligns with her work in The New Pornographers, as she employs cosmic imagery in describing how even those who are a lot need love: “I’m a meteor shattering around you/And I’m sorry/But I’ve become a solar system/Since I found you.”
As with Case’s previous albums, Neon Grey Midnight Green is informed by loss but not exclusively defined by it. She puts a playful spin on a body horror trope on “Baby, I’m Not (A Werewolf)”, singing “Imagine my confusion and my horror, my body said to me as if to another… baby I’m not a werewolf,” only to turn it back around: “but I don’t know about you.” And through an Americana noir arrangement reminiscent of her Blacklisted material on the title track, she’s a “custodian at the agency/that keeps the planets aligned,” dreaming of being set free: “There’s a breeze blowing through the back door/Where I should walk free.” But elegiac moments arise throughout, like “Winchester Mansion of Sound,” wherein a remembrance of late musician Dexter Romweber (“Only you can play so far out of tune/And still kick me in the heart”) leads to a joyful “Down Down Baby” clapping game chant.
While Case is no stranger to dramatic and unorthodox musical statements—like when she assembled a “piano orchestra” on 2009’s Middle Cyclone—Neon Grey Midnight Green is a uniquely gorgeous and big-sounding album. It’s essentially an album’s worth of dramatic statements, like the gorgeous orchestration of “Oh, Neglect…” or the rise from haunting folk rock into layers of Case’s own vocals on “An Ice Age.” Case offers an abundance of joy and beauty throughout Neon Grey Midnight Green, and a reaffirmation that life and its wonders—however temporary—are a gift.
Label: Anti-
Year: 2025
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Neko Case : Neon Grey Midnight Green
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