
Neko Case
Thursday, September 1
7:00 pm
First Avenue
701 1st Ave N, Minneapolis, MN 55403
Doors open at 7PM | Show starts at 8PM | 18+ | $36
$1 from every ticket will go to Peer Solutions and support their positive youth leadership and development program designed to prevent harm before it begins and engage lifetime ambassadors of positive change (www.peersolutions.org)
Is there another songwriter so fearless and inventive? Bending decades of pop music into new shapes, Neko Case wields her voice like a kiss and her metaphors like a baseball bat. She has cast the fishing net of her career wide—from Seattle and Vancouver to Chicago and Stockholm, setting up her home base on a farm in New England.
Gathering power year after year, Neko sings with the fierce abandon of a newborn infant crying in a basket in the woods. Since escaping the labels of country and Americana, the gorgeous train-whistle vocals of her early career sit submerged in her later style, where their ghost can appear any minute. When her voice jumps an octave, it’s almost visible, like sparks at night. “I never knew where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do with my voice,” she says, “but I just wanted to do it so bad.”
With a career spanning over twenty years, she has famously collaborated with The New Pornographers and Case/Lang/Veirs in addition to releasing many critically acclaimed solo albums, including Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, Middle Cyclone, and most recently 2018’s Hell-On.
She’s doing it on her own terms, but the legacy she’s building is one that can stand up to music made by any other solo artist in her lifetime. Don’t look away; you never know what might happen. “I’m just trying,” she says, “to be myself as hard as I can.”
Disq have assembled a razor-sharp, teetering-on-the-edge-of-chaos melange of sounds, experiences, memories, and influences. Due out March 6 on Saddle Creek, Collector ought to be taken literally—it is a place to explore and catalogue the Madison, Wisconsin band’s relationships to themselves, their pasts, and the world beyond the American Midwest as they careen from their teens into their 20s. This turbulence is backdropped by gnarled power pop, anxious post-punk, warm psych-folk, and hectic, formless, tongue-in-cheek indie rock.
Collector, like the band itself, is defined and tightly-contoured by the ties between the five members. Raina Bock (bass/vocals) and Isaac deBroux-Slone (guitar/vocals) have known each other from infancy, growing up and into music together. Through gigging around Madison, they met and befriended Shannon Connor (guitar/keys), Logan Severson (guitar/backing vocals), and Brendan Manley (drums)—three equally dedicated and adventurous musicians committed to coaxing genre boundaries.
Produced by Rob Schnapf, Collector is a set of songs largely pulled from each of the five members’ demo piles over the years. They’re organic representations of each moment in time, gathered together to tell a mixtape-story of growing up in 21st century America. The songs are marked by urgency, introspection, tongue-in-cheek nihilism, and a shrewd understanding of pop and rock structures and their corollaries—as well as a keen desire to dialogue with and upset them.
