Pitchfork

The voice looms larger than ever. It's almost unfair. Draped in luscious, acute reverb, every phrase is granted its own pitch-perfect spotlight, and each precious syllable stands alone as a singular accomplishment. On Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, Neko Case's peerless cries crash through the mix with unprecedented force, their natural grandeur captured in sonorous surround sound.

But it's not all about the voice; songs are important, too. Case's lungs-for-days Dollywood boom may be as direct an emotional instrument as there is in contemporary music, but her increasingly prominent songwriting skills tend to eschew visceral connections for intellectual intrigue and poetic mystery-- and Flood features Case's most cryptic lyrics to date. The odd disconnect here between singer and songwriter is absorbing: Though shaded by finely-tuned, country-noir twang, the rapturous belter's high-minded lyrical aspirations often undermine her throat's unhindered veracity.

Given her former life as an art-school punk, Case's increasingly independent, non-traditional songwriting trajectory isn't totally surprising. Moving from the countrified mix of covers and originals of her solo debut, 1997's The Virginian, to 2000's Furnace Room Lullaby, which featured mostly originals co-written by Case, to 2002's Blacklisted, on which the singer wrote most of the alluringly bluesy songs on her own, Case's musical ambitions have evolved and taken greater definition with each successive album.

Flood finds Case continuing to write the lion's share of her material, while also producing and mixing. Appropriately, it's a logical extension of the themes, instrumentation, and mood of Blacklisted. Long gone are the relatively straightforward Furnace-era break-up laments with their simple-yet-effective couplets like, "Oh my darlin', oh my darlin', how can you forget/ All the love we had between us, now it's like we never met." Removing herself from many of the album's David Lynch-like narratives, Case often embraces the role of omnipotent storyteller.

One such twisty tale is the harrowing rich-girl/poor-girl opener, "Margaret Vs. Pauline". Strolling alongside a frolicking, Jon Brion-esque piano, wordy descriptors and odd details inform a striking gap between the song's haunting title pair. Describing the blessed beauty Pauline, Case sings, "And they placed an ingot in her breast to burn cool and collected/ Fate holds her firm in its cradle and then rolls her for a tender pause to savor." Lines like that don't roll off with ease, but within the scheme of the album, they can add up to something palpably uncomfortable-- a vague, inescapable sense of loss.

Confessional only in the most roundabout sense, Case's songs set up strange anecdotal skeletons that beg listeners to connect the dots between. "Star Witness" may be about a car accident, a shooting, a deep love wiped away, or all of those things. Bound together by an awe-inspiring, harmony-laden hook, the swaying waltz may seem like free-associating farce at first, but subsequent exposures offer slight turns. There's no right answer to "Star Witness", but its keen open-endedness is an appealing destination in itself. Such complex examples of Case's unique songwriting string theory abound, from the ghostly, near-a cappella "A Widow's Toast", to the quasi-political, fable-based title track, to "Dirty Knife", a haunted-house elegy to madness. Each track relies on a starkly defined bleakness to guide its queasy understanding of an existence between the bitter end and its sometimes-sweeter aftermath.

What once again prevents Case from delivering a front-to-back classic is a perfectionist streak that accounts for Flood's mannered meticulousness. A nice-enough reinterpretation of traditional folk spiritual "John Saw That Number" rumbles along amiably but Case can't adequately summon the spontaneous affectations that the gospel-style track requires to truly transcend. Though she often cites churchly touchstone Bessie Griffin as a guiding influence, it seems as if Case's hard-line precision rarely allows her to encapsulate Griffin's untethered style and act in the moment. Such flawless phrasing can cause songs to become too treasurable, as if they're off-limits, encrusted under a thick glass casing.

Still, nobody today does eerie dust-bowl balladry and anachronistic rustic-murder milieu quite like Case. Combining country, folk, and old-school rock, she faithfully invokes scenes of late-night wandererings illuminated by a jalopy's lone functional headlight. As a refined version of Blacklisted, Flood provides alluring riddles and obsessive desolation, Case subverting her easy-access vocals with difficult abstractions and heady projections. Yet, after fishing through Flood's 12 intricate tracks, a plainspoken love song delivered in that voice would not be unwelcome.