In the press release that accompanies
Neko Case's 2004 live album,
The Tigers Have Spoken, the singer (and her record company) insist quite strongly that this isn't meant to be a stopgap release on the way to her next studio project. To be blunt,
Case protests a bit much on this issue -- an album featuring two re-recorded originals and five covers out of 11 tracks is carrying an awful lot of padding for something intended to be a proper "new" release. But if
The Tigers Have Spoken is really intended to keep fans occupied until
Case finishes her next project, she thankfully hasn't abandoned her standards of quality control along the way, and delivers some splendid music on this disc. Recorded over the course of three gigs in the spring of 2004,
The Tigers Have Spoken features
Case backed by
the Sadies, whose web of deep, lonesome twang fits
Case's repertoire like a glove, with
Jon Rauhouse sitting in on pedal steel with his usual grace and flawless feel, and
Kelly Hogan and
Carolyn Mark contributing backing vocals that are little short of glorious. But the reason
Neko Case is headlining over this stellar cast is because she has one of the finest voices to emerge from pop music in recent memory, and she's in firm command of her instrument on these performances. Allowing herself more room to rock than on 2002's
Blacklisted,
Case rips it up on covers of classic tunes by
Buffy Sainte-Marie,
Loretta Lynn, and
the Shangri-Las, and "The Tigers Have Spoken" and "Hex" show
Case isn't saving all her good new songs for the next album. Maybe
Case is biding her time with
The Tigers Have Spoken, but she sure isn't wasting it -- if it's a relatively minor effort, it still sounds like the work of a major artist, and there's lots of pleasure to be found in it. ~ Mark Deming