Digest - The Morning News

Listening • Empire for Ashes

A thousand American Idol winners singing through a thousand autotune modulators will never make a Voice, a singer to be reckoned with, instinctually appreciated, and surrendered to. Very few of our musicians could just as easily go by the title of singer alone, which is what makes Neko Case and her dulcet serenades so transfixing.

Her new album, Middle Cyclone (which boasts some of the most kickass cover art seen in a hot minute), is due this coming Tuesday, March 3. As she bends slowly away from the roots-of-country sounds that gave her a broad appeal and audience, she finds gradual interest and gratification in gently teasing the boundaries of the low-key, wistful realms of alt-whatever-it-is, where she reigns as queen. So broad (and, some would say, bourgeois) is her appeal that NPR is currently streaming the album in its entirety from their site. But let it not be said that she’s “sold out” or gone middlebrow or, worse yet, lost her edge. This is the same woman, capable of both the most affecting earnesty and the most sublime tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation, mind you, who appeared as siren Chrysanthemum, quite fittingly, on an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. If that ain’t cred … —Erik Bryan, Feb. 27, 2009

» Listen to "Middle Cyclone" at MBV Music

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Listening • Make of That What You Will

Just as a cat meows or a man who graduates with a Psych or Liberal Arts degree will most likely keep working at whatever service industry position he was holding prior to graduation, not only because he doesn’t really have any great prospects at the moment but because he’s also kind of comfortable there, new Carl Newman songs will always be posted here.

Carl Newman, being the bulk of the creative motivation behind one of the Aught’s best power pop-cum-professional rock acts, the consistently incredible New Pornographers, is releasing a follow-up to his excellent 2004 solo album The Slow Wonder with Get Guilty (Jan. 20)—possibly a play on Elvis Costello’s excellent Get Happy!!. As with The Slow Wonder, we can expect a tonal reduction of the bombastic, burgeoning, full-band sound that the New Pornographers cultivates (due in no small part to the participation of stars-in-their-own-right Dan Bejar of Destroyer and Neko Case of herself). Get Guilty should signal a return to Newman’s quasi-rustic self-reliance and a softening of instrumentation that sounds both nostalgic and grand. His thoughts tend to appropriately focus on smaller things on these solo albums, as if he’s at greater leisure to investigate the minutiae of experience, which, in turn, elevates the significance of a sigh or backward glance to something deeply revelatory.

His newly released song, “There Were Maybe Ten or Twelve,” appears as the first track on Matador Records’ free fall sampler, which also includes new tracks by Belle & Sebastian and Lou Reed, among notable others. It seems the bar for the rest of 2009 will be set perilously high by the end of January. —Erik Bryan, Nov. 12, 2008

» Listen to "There Were Maybe Ten or Twelve" at The Catbirdseat

SHARE THIS • EMAIL THIS • FILE UNDER: Carl Newman, Dan Bejar, Matador Records, Neko Case

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