borrelli told me to listen to this: neko case – middle cyclone
I’m listening to albums that Borrelli has recommended and posting my thoughts and feelings and fanciful speculations and darkest fears about those albums here.
This album’s thesis is that a woman is a fierce beast or a machine with fast-moving parts or an area of closed, circular fluid motion rotating in the same direction as the Earth’s rotation. You shouldn’t turn your back on her or poke at her with sticks. Don’t wear a necktie or long sleeves near her. Tie back your long hair. Wear your protective glasses. Do not remove the hand guards. When you go to sleep for the night, make sure your food is locked in your car or suspended from a tree by a rope.
If you find that a woman loves you, you should go door-to-door in your trailer park and warn your neighbours that one day everything they own will blow away and their homes will crumple and their cocker spaniels will fly and fall and die.
The problem I usually run into when listening to Neko’s particular genre of smoky-voiced country-rock (to which Kathleen Edwards also belongs) is that I’m on board with the rockers, but the ballads can’t sustain me. After the third plodding lament about the death of a man or a dog or a truck I have tuned out. This may make me a terrible listener or an ADD schoolchild but these are my symptoms and there is much music out there to choose from.
Neko Case keeps me involved during the ballad bits by singing about punching people in their faces. Her lyrics are smart and subtly humorous.
To get the photograph for Middle Cyclone’s album cover, Neko Case used her time-travelling Oldsmobile Cutlass to help the Spartans defeat the Persians at Thermopylae.
