The Musical Box

neko case performs tonight at woodsongs. photo by jason creps.

The song that always slays me is Deep Red Bells. To this day, if anyone asks what is so arresting about the music of Neko Case, that’s the first tune they are sent to.

The guitars ring and swirl, owing equally to country and psychedelia with a touch of Twin Peaks-style twang. It could be The Cure or The Byrds at work, if you didn’t know better.

Then we have the imagery, like the reference to the Valley of the Shadow and the bells that beckon you it. Ask not for whom the deep red bells toll, eh?

But all of that pales once the voice enters. Case’s singing rings out on the songs as if it was recorded on an mid-autumn evening - a time when there’s just enough chill in the air to silence the crickets so her vocals can wail on for miles. But when the tune briefly jumps into country mode for its last verse (the one that suggests casting your soul about “like an old paper bag past empty lots and early graves”), the mood becomes all the more wondrous. The twinge of reverb on the chorus serves as icing.

Deep Red Bells was the sign that Case’s music was becoming less agreeable to categorization as it became more popular. The evolution was already in place when Case made her Lexington debut with an October 2000 concert at Lynagh’s Music Club behind her Furnace Room Lullaby album. Many at the time made her out to be the new chanteuse of the alt-country movement. But the singer would have none of that.

“I don’t want to be ghettoized by some term like alternative country,” Case said prior to that performance. “I’ve listened to country music growing up, and that’s the music I want to play. I don’t feel I have to justify it by saying it’s ‘alternative’ or anything else.”

In terms of artistic progression, of course, Deep Red Bells is ancient history for Case, who returns to Lexington tonight for a sold out taping of the WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour. The song was recorded for her 2002 Blacklisted album, the third of her six LP-length recordings but the last for the indie Chicago label Bloodshot.

By the time Case played The Dame in 2006 with the sublime Canadian neo-country stylists The Sadies, the blurring of stylistic boundaries was more than apparent. Her then-current album, 2004’s The Tigers Have Spoken, was a concert scrapbook of a record. The leadoff song, If You Knew, was another Neko primer tune with lyrics of jagged and restless romanticism, a richly complimentary Sadies backdrop full of Byrds-like guitar jangle, strong elements of vintage girl group pop thanks to harmonies by Kelly Hogan (who will again accompany Case at WoodSongs) and Carolyn Mark and a soaring vocal lead seemingly propelled by a deep, nocturnal muse.

The rest of the album merrily shot all over the map, from covers of tunes written or popularized by Loretta Lynn (a commanding pedal steel hullabaloo version of Rated X), The Shangri Las (a tambourine shaking, twang fortified The Train From Kansas City), Buffy Sainte-Marie (a harmony happy reading of Soulful Shade of Blue) as well as an update of Blacklisted’s title tune that sounds like a night train bound for bedlam.

“I’m sure there are a million common threads Buffy Sainte-Marie and Loretta Lynn share,” Case said before the Dame concert. “As far as why we chose these particular tunes … well, we don’t completely know the answer to that. We like them in a way fans like them. It’s not an intellectual process.”

All of which set the stage for Middle Cyclone, the album that became a certifiable hit for Case in March. It shot to No. 3 on the Billboard Top 200, outscored only by U2 and Taylor Swift.

There is a vicious streak to some of the Cyclone songs. Some it is ripe with retribution, as in People Got a Lotta Nerve, where man’s molestation of animals literally bites him back. “I’m a man man man man man man eater,” Case sings in chant like glee as though she is one of the killer whales imprisoned in the song. “But still you’re surprised prised prised, when I eat ‘ya.”

Storm/cyclone/tornado imagery pervades the rest of the album, upping the restlessness level established on her early records. But again, the jangly pop sound and that positively royal voice disarm the tune’s initial sting.

“Putting her big torchy voice behind larger than life imagery, she’s fearless through every transformation, merging herself with storms,” wrote Jon Pareles of Middle Cyclone last March in The New York Times. “She’s as dangerous as she is devoted.”

True to that form, Case appears to be very much the warrior on the cover of Middle Cyclone as she sits atop the roof of her 1968 Mercury Cougar brandishing a rapier.

“I don’t like getting my picture taken,” Case told Time Out New York before a spring performance at the Nokia Theater. “I thought if I was an eight year old boy, what would I want to see on the cover of my record? If I was an eight year old boy, I’d want me to have a sword.”

Neko Case performs at 7 tonight for the WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour at the Kentucky Theatre, 214 E. Main St. The taping is sold out.