Quotes of the Day

A friend once told me he'd be happy to hear Neko Case sing passages from the phone book. It's no wonder. As on Case's previous three studio albums, the voice on her latest release, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, sucks you in with its seemingly effortless power and range, an intoxicating quality that blends the best of country and gospel. Her voice is the strongest instrument on the album. Every song feels as if it were written around it.

But Case, 35, never does sound like she might as well be singing from the phone book. Her lyrics, heavy on the imagery, set a vivid mood even on those songs, like the title track, where the details of her narrative seem fuzzy. From start to finish, Fox Confessor is filled with tales of loss, hard luck, and longing that leave much to listeners' imagination. Take, for example. the opener Margaret vs. Pauline, a story about two young women: one graceful, with "an ingot in her breast to burn cool and collected," the other unfocused and resentful, whose "jaw aches from wanting." The closing lyrics are as close as Case gets to explaining the fierce tension one woman feels for the other. ("Two girls walk down the same street/ One left a sweater sitting on the train and the other lost three fingers at the cannery.") Case's stories, however, are first and foremost about sentiments and characters, not the concrete events that shaped them.

Case has arrived at her vocal and lyrical maturity via a meandering musical route, giving a handful of genres a try along the way. (That same route, by the way, could also make the Washington-State-raised Chicago resident eligible for a prize as Most Canadian Non-Canadian to Live Outside of Canada.) While at art school in Vancouver in the 1990s, Case played drums in a couple punk outfits. Her upbeat alter ego from those days still surfaces regularly when she sings with the New Pornographers, Vancouver's indie pop-rock supergroup. And Case has also been in cahoots lately with Toronto twang-rockers, the Sadies, who share song-writing credit on a few Fox Confessor tracks and add instruments on a few more. Case's musical wanderings are no doubt part of what makes her talents so appealing to so many. Fox Confessor isn't so much a showcase of her versatility as much as it feels a product of it; here is an album that could fit nicely into the collection of blues, country, indie-rock, and adult-contemporary fans alike.

• Laura Blue