August 20, 2002 by A.S. Van Dorston

Cutting her musical teeth as a punk rock drummer, Neko Case became a leading light in the alternative country scene with her solo albums The Virginian (1997) and Furnace Room Lullaby (2000). As good as those albums were, something big happened in the last couple years. Whether it was hard touring or she went to the crossroads and sold her soul to the devil, Case has blossomed into a world class songwriter and singer, totally in the league of Patsy Cline, Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn. It’s hard to believe this is the same woman who blended in innocuously in the last New Pornographers tour.

The songs on Blacklisted range from amazing to devastating. Many of the songs have an added weight of brooding, gothic dread, perhaps rubbed off from Nick Cave when she opened for him. The production makes the album sound like it could have been recorded in the sixties, as if Owen Bradley was at the controls. Except that frankly nothing in the sixties sounded quite this rich and frightening. It was actually recorded in Tucson with Giant Sand. There are touches of Ennio Morricone’s Western desolation, and Wanda Jackson’s rockabilly. It’s nearly impossible to pick the gems from the jewels, but “Deep Red Bells” is guaranteed to make you melt at its beauty and vivid sensory imagery (“It looks a lot like engine oil, and tastes like being poor and small/And Popsicles in summer”). “Tightly” shimmers like the moonlight in a country pond (“When I’m walking under trees I’m free to covet all I please/New moon’s in the alley and it’s madness…If I meet you in the night you’re free to covet all you like/Don’t you try and stop me I cling tightly, to this life.”)

“Look For Me (I’ll Be Around)” covers the same creepy, noirish territory that Eleni Mandell has done so well, but is even more convincingly menacing. “Pretty Girls” even tops it. With its powerful feminist message, it’s too bad Patsy Cline didn’t live to get a taste of this strength. “I Wish I Was The Moon” wins out as the album’s loveliest ballad, while the ferocity of Case’s cover of “Runnin’ Out Of Fools” gives Aretha Franklin a run for her money, with a soulfully angelic chorus of Kelly Hogan and Mary Margaret O’Hara not far behind. Between the tears and shivers, Blacklisted quite simply blows every country and countryish album out of the water from the past half decade. You know what to do.