Neko Case & Her Boyfriends: Furnace Room Lullaby

Singer-songwriter Neko Case has a classic country-music voice: powerful, throaty, vulnerable. It's the kind of voice that helped make Nashville, and upon which Nashville later turned its back. No matter; Nashville doesn't deserve an album as good as Furnace Room Lullaby, the second release from Neko Case and Her Boyfriends, an expansive, rotating backing band that on some tracks includes Kelly Hogan and Ron Sexsmith (who helped write two of the album's tracks). But the focus of each song falls on Case, because, with a voice like hers, it has to. Equally suited to belt out the shifty, devil-may-care anthem "Mood To Burn Bridges," the ethereal "Porchlight," and the smoky "No Need To Cry," Case runs the gamut of country styles, though her album sounds remarkably unified from start to finish. Some tracks do stand out: On "Thrice All American," Case crafts a love song to Tacoma, Washington, a city-in-decline that the song's protagonist loves far more than it loves her back. Elsewhere, the album-closing title track uses Southwestern touches to create a mounting sense of doom, as an affair, or possibly a life, comes to a premature end. Case may have gotten her start as a drummer in a punk-pop band, but when it comes to country, she couldn't be more like the real thing. That she doesn't sound like she's trying at all proves to be one of her greatest strengths.