On Saturday night, Neko Case brought her Wild Creatures tour back to the Philly area, with a stop at Ardmore Music Hall.
Following an opening set from folk bonafide Lucy Wainwright Roche that was equal parts VH1-storytellers and legitimately humorous stand-up comedy, Case and co. waved hello, and strummed the first wistful opening chords of “I Wish I Was The Moon,” soon followed by shimmering Case-staples like “Deep Red Bells,” “This Tornado Loves You,” “Maybe Sparrow.”
Setlist-wise, the show was nearly identical to their last Union Transfer appearance, two years back, just a few months following the release of a career-retrospective compilation spanning Case’s six studio albums across almost twenty years of solo recordings – with both tour setlists as well as the compilation notably excluding the singer’s 1997 debut record.
Neko Case | photo by Josh Pelta-Heller for WXPN
There’s a degree of pop-sensible safe-ness that spans her performances, now, a markedly measured musicality for a performer who for decades has built a legacy that in many ways traded in an evasion of the constraints of genre. She built a body of work out of the sort of daring material that demands contorted, confounding, multi-hyphenate descriptors from music journalists who have long written of the “cuddlecore” of her early Vancouver-based punk bands Cub and Maow, of her alt-country recordings with “Her Boyfriends” or with Carolyn Mark as The Corn Sisters, of her indie-rock-power-pop-krautrock-flavored whatever-you-might-call the nine incredible records she’s made with her New Pornographers supergroup compatriots.
While Case’s solo shows of late have been a little less wild – calmer, say, than the singer’s untamed shock of iconic red hair – they still manage to deliver something new. This time around, she aired out three selections slated for release on an upcoming 2025 record: “Wreck,” “Little Gears,” and “Oh, Neglect,” all performed beautifully and received as warmly by a sold-out crowd as the rest of the well-loved set, with the singer’s soaring, golden voice shining throughout.