A Handful of Dust

The consensus seems to be that Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh's best novel, but I simply cannot figure that one out. Waugh was at his best as a satirist--and the more acidic and pervasive his cynicism, the sharper and more humorous his satire was. He never wrote satire more finely pointed and more wickedly barbed than he did in A Handful of Dust.

This novel also bears with it a cultural relevance that surpasses that of Waugh's other novels. Given its affinities with (and numerous allusions to) T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, A Handful of Dust is the most modern of Waugh's novels. In fact, the title is taken from the first section of The Waste Land, and bears with it echoes of Biblical significance: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The yearning for genuine spiritual meaning--and the profound absence of it in modern culture--is the grounding idea of both works. We see this spiritual lack in all aspects of the British society depicted in A Handful of Dust, but to most direct (and most humorous) effect in the portrait of the vicar of Hetton, who has been recycling sermons since his days as a garrison chaplain in India. With his dated references to Queen Victoria and the golden age of British imperialism, his Christmas-time references to the unceasing heat, and his frequent mention of camels and tigers, his sermons are utterly irrelevant to his parishioners--and yet he "had a noble and sonorous voice and was reckoned the best preacher for many miles around." At one point, Tony Last, the novel's aptly-named protagonist, thinks of renovating the bathrooms in his Gothic mansion during the vicar's sermon.

And yet Tony (with the exception of his smart-alecky but endearing young son) is just about the most sympathetic thing going in this novel. He is hapless and bumbling, but at least he quests for something. It may be a fool's errand he sends himself on, but he at least realizes that something is missing, even if he cannot himself restore it to the world he lives in. At many points, the novel verges on mean-spirited; Waugh does some awful things to his characters. But this mean-spiritedness may simply be an essential element of satire, which to some extent requires grotesquerie and violence in order to make its point. Satire that does not sting is merely humor, like a late-night talk-show host who makes fun of whoever is in office because it is part of the job description. In the most famous satire of all time, Swift told us to eat babies. Waugh does not go quite that far, but there is some untowardly violence here. He makes his point.

Middle Cyclone

The first impression made by Middle Cyclone, Neko Case's new album, is a little misleading. There are enough mid-tempo numbers, enough lilting melodies with finger-picked guitar, that the songs seem at first to bear a limited variety. Unlike previous Neko Case albums, Middle Cyclone boasts few moments at which one instrument or another (usually an electric guitar) stands out in a spotlight-stealing way. Sure, there are plenty of top-notch musicians at work in these songs, but never before has it sounded so much as though the axes-for-hire are playing entirely to support her. The end result is that after a few listens you come to the realization of what this album is all about. It's about the voice--and it's a good thing that it is so.

It seems odd, at first, that a voice like Case's would benefit from such intensive musical support, but it makes sense in the end. Everywhere you look (The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Pitchfork), writers are calling Case's voice a "force of nature." That it is, and it is especially apt here, given the nature-themed songs that populate this album. But Case, whose ear for sound design is as precisely tuned as her voice, understands that if her voice unadorned is a force of nature, it will sound otherworldly--positively celestial--given the right accompaniment. That accompaniment comes not only from all those great guitarists (just to list the guitar players on her last few albums: Dallas and Travis Good of The Sadies, Joey Burns of Calexico, M. Ward, and the often understated but very talented Paul Rigby of Case's touring band) but also from piano and keyboards played by Garth Hudson of The Band and Howe Gelb of Giant Sand and background vocals by Kelly Hogan and a host of others (including Case's own overdubbed harmonies). In addition, Case, who has co-produced her recent albums, wields spring reverb like a weapon; in her studio recordings, it has become an instrument of its own--not quite the complete washing that it sometimes is on My Morning Jacket albums, but generously present, enough to vault things up into the stratosphere.

A good way to put Case's sound in perspective is to watch the stripped-down readings of several songs from Middle Cyclone via a recent podcast on The Interface. Accompanied only by Paul Rigby playing six-string acoustic guitar and Kelly Hogan singing harmonies, Case sounds spectacular. Here is her voice with minimal adornment, and it leaves you no doubt of its natural power. You also get a sense, however, of how much the full-band sound and the studio treatment add to these songs. Case did not write and arrange them for solo troubadour performance. Case's voice has a natural luster and lushness, and the studio arrangements are done precisely to enhance these qualities. The final product is an eminently appealing one--the most fully Neko Case of Neko Case albums so far.

Case has certainly found herself more truly and more strange on this album, but more and more in her songwriting you have to ask where exactly she is in the midst of these swirling words. The lyrics of many of these songs employ shifting personas, slippery voices that can at best be only partial reflections of Case herself. "I'm not the man you thought I was," she sings on "Vengeance Is Sleeping"--fair enough. "Prison Girls," one of the best songs of Case's career thus far, unfolds with a hallucinatory dream-logic all its own. In the interview from the Interface podcast, Case attributes the origin of this song (and that of "This Tornado Loves You") to a dream. Ostensibly, there is something about touring or at least travel involved in "Prison Girls"; the events described seemingly take place in a hotel. And a song about women inmates inescapably evokes the familar Case theme of gender roles in the postfeminist era (cp. "Pretty Girls" from 2002's Blacklisted). But it's the dream quality that sticks with the listener. The imagery in the song is hallucinatory but not psychedelic, Freudian in the truest, weirdest sense. It bears a remote kinship with the fever-dream quality of Howlin' Wolf's "Moanin' at Midnight." What distinguishes the tones of these two songs, though, is that while "Moanin' at Midnight" is shot through with paranoia, "Prison Girls" features a world-weary attitude of mildly bemused cynicism. When the persona sings to the mind's-eye prison girls (imagine a troop of them straight out of a low-grade '50s cult flick, then merge them with an equivalent number of motel cleaning ladies) that she "loves your long shadows and your gunpowder eyes," she discovers: "The prison girls are not impressed / The ones who have to clean this mess / They've traded more for cigarettes than I have managed to express." The harmonies and the plucked cello push this song into the sublime.

Elsewhere on the album, Case sings about wanting to be loved and about the failure of love with the kind of directness she has used before (cp. "Outro with Bees" and "I Missed the Point" from Blacklisted) but with a new level of maturity and a startlingly frank brand of self-examination. On the title track, Case sings: "I can't give up acting tough / It's all that I'm made of / Can't scrape together quite enough / To ride the bus to the outskirts of the fact / That I need love." The prime mover of the album, though--from the tornado-themed imagery of the opening track to the zoo animals gone berserk of the first single ("People Got a Lotta Nerve") and beyond--is Case's attitude toward kingdom animalia. This theme and others on the album climax in "I'm an Animal"--subtly but undeniably the most rocking song on Middle Cyclone. "I'm an Animal" is about the kind of certainty that comes only from instinct; it's about love as action. And it serves as a reminder that if we don't follow those instincts sometimes we ourselves end up not so different from the caged tiger that finally cracks. When we remember (happy birthday, Darwin) that we are animals, too, we lose some of our purchase on this place we inhabit. We become just another migrant species in the evolutionary chain, but, unexpectedly perhaps, we also become more connected to where we are in the world. All of this is implicit in these songs. The role of nature carries over into the overall sound of the album--and not just in the closing track--a thirty-plus minute field recording called "Marais la Nuit," which consists enitrely of frogs singing from a pond outside Case's rural Vermont home. You won't find yourself listening to this track all the way through very often, but at the same time you won't really mind its being there. It reinforces the major theme at work here, but also reminds us that Case is at the point in her career when her albums are wholly her own.

Case's ear for sound idiom has transposed steadily from a particularly fiery brand of alt-country to a more contemporary baroque indie-pop, but it still somehow maintains the earnestness and immediacy of the analog garage-band aesthetic. Middle Cyclone maintains a layered but organic sound, not decadent with manufactured tones. Still, it's all about the vox. Case refers to herself as the "horn section" of any band she is in, but what she means--self-deprecatingly describing herself as brassy and blaring--doesn't capture the truth of this statement. Listening to Case sing, you are made aware (through the sheer volume she musters, a quality that no amount of studio compression can disguise) of what an intensely physical event singing can be. There's no point singing along to these songs; even for the shower or a country drive, you can't do them justice. But there is a useful exercise in breathing along with Case as she sings. You realize that there's a lot of air being pushed through those pipes. You get a feel for the effort that's involved here, one that starts somewhere in the middle and breathes outward like heaves of storm.