Jane gets around to do making it

The Neko Case songs that I like best roll up and down the piano under a Patsy Cline voice turned a little cloudy, a little dark (like apple cider vinegar kept around too long). That's the kind of thing that I find in "Magpie to the Morning" and "Red Tide" and, most of all, the title track, "Middle Cyclone." A number of the songs on this album also have lyrics that lie just one side of country music, just inches away from schmaltz. Take the long infinitive phrase "to ride the bus to the outskirts of the fact that I need love." And some of the songs on this album borrow unlikely personas to great effect--"You Got a Nerve" and "This Tornado Loves You" being the best examples.

When she is good, then, Neko Case is very, very good. And when she is bad she is, well, not horrid, not even quite bad, but staged. Something in "Prison Girls," for instance, strikes me as overreaching, like period pieces often strike me as overreaching, but where everything's done up denim and white leather jackets (okay, those white leather jackets are from "The Pharoahs," another song I'm not nuts about) instead of in lace and tulle and organzas.

Do Make Say Think, on the other hand, can be a little undercrafted sometimes. There's something a little directionless, for instance, in the way many of these songs begin--"Ontario Plates" being a prime example. But that song, like many of the others on this album moves into something resolutely joyful, something celebratory but not triumphalist. "Auberge Le Mouton Noir," for its part, never falters; a little classical and a little shoe-gazey and a little punk and a little hymnody, it makes my mind play all kinds of bright, blurry filmstrips.

Wendell is fussing, so I'll condense: Do Make Say Think wins.