LADY PILOT, NOT AFRAID OF DYING:
NEKO CASE IN ROCHESTER, NY

Neko Case has day-old donut smeared on her jeans tonight. She’s just drifted out of one of her signature ballads, floating on wanderlust and an elemental understanding of Americana, and she looks down from the spotlight and notices that morsel of donut. Being Neko Case, she shatters the audience’s illusion that she exists like a spirit born out of Washington forests, turning her dirtied pants into a piece of stage banter before she gallops into her next song.

The lurching contrast between the noirish reveries of her music and the blunt, vaguely sarcastic way she engages her audience is representative of my three experiences with Neko’s live performance, and perhaps an indicator of why I’d gladly pursue a fourth. The records are one thing, mood baths that painstakingly balance her radio-pop and more animalistic songwriting tendencies, but the live show’s equally essential with its tonal melding and subtle bravura. There’s so little attention called to the effort involved in performing this music — no guitar flourishes or excessive coughing, no indulgent clarification of what each song is “about” — that it’s easy to miss how memorable everything is until you’ve already been ushered into the street.

Much was made of this being an unofficial “make-up” show for the planned outdoor concert in Buffalo that Neko was forced to cancel earlier this year, so it was expected that the main setlist trotted out as many highlights off Middle Cyclone and Fox Confessor as it could condense into seventy-five minutes. Opener “Things That Scare Me” was a particularly welcome start for fans of Blacklisted, initiating the stage projections with a clip of headlights hazily piercing the dark of some middle American interstate. These continued throughout the set and were neither as intrusive nor as pretentious as the image “stage projection” evokes, alternating between folk animation similar to the Fox Confessor artwork and other abstractions.

Highlights included the gorgeously brief “A Widow’s Toast,” introduced by back-up singer Kelly Hogan as “one we don’t play very much”; “Deep Red Bells,” whose precise melodic shift always doubles in electricity in the live setting; and “Fever,” one of Middle Cyclone’s strongest tracks and one during which Neko was joined onstage by opener Sarah Harmer.

Most striking of all was the first encore song, the hushed “Vengeance Is Sleeping,” where an acoustic guitar ebbs and swirls around confessional lyrics (“I”m not the man you thought I was”) in the finger-picking style of Leonard Cohen and Marissa Nadler. Long-praised for her obviously stunning vocals, moments like these confirm Case’s talent as extending far beyond her vocal range. By the time she collapses wearily into the song’s final line — “I”m not the man you think I am,” repeated to emphasize the change in tense — she’s made a succcessful argument as one of the era’s purest and discreetly moving songwriters. Certainly Rochester was wise to showcase that vital, ambulant talent, no matter what she had for dessert yesterday.

Mike Spreter, Photo: Andrew Walker

Setlist:
Neko Case in Rochester NY: 11/8/09
“things that scare me”
“maybe sparrow”
“at last”
“people got a lotta nerve”
“i wish i was the moon”
“hold on, hold on”
“i’m an animal”
“middle cyclone”
“the pharaohs”
“polar nettles”
“deep red bells”
“a widow’s toast”
“margaret vs. pauline”
“prison girls”
“the tigers have spoken”
“fever”
“red tide”
“don’t forget me”
“this tornado loves you”
–
“vengeance is sleeping
“lady pilot”
“train to kansas city”