Neko Case: Live From Austin TX DVD

Having watched Austin City Limits a few times, I sort of suspect that producers distribute the show to PBS affiliates on palimpsestic VHS tapes. No matter where I've seen it air, D.C. or Charlotte or Atlanta, it looks and sounds smothered, as if broadcast from underwater. Sort of dampens what you suspect is a terrific performance.

So it's a treat that Americana indie label New West gives us this series of DVDs, Live From Austin TX -- full concert versions of ACL performances, shined and lovingly mastered. And it's pretty exciting to me that alongside seminal twangsters such as Willie Waylon Guy Johnny Steve & Lucinda, they this month release Neko Case's 2003 performance.

The Disc

In the caring hands of New West, ACL cleans up nice. The video is cool and smooth, occasionally blurry in the long angles, but at medium and close angles the violet and cream-colored stage lights lay a silky texture across the air. The brown roots of Neko's hair, finger smudges on Jon Rauhouse's steel bar -- all is vivid. The weathered archtop of Tom V Ray's upright bass, in particular, is terrifically tactile.

A DTS 5.1 mix spreads the instruments across the surround channels in a sort of pop-up book exaggeration of the stage spread. Rauhouse's banjo plunks over your left shoulder, and Tom V Ray's tambourine jingles at the rear right. My wife hates this effect, because it doesn't approximate at all the live experience. At a concert, the musicians don't encircle you like wolves (though I sort of dig that idea). As I write this it occurs to me that neither do you get to float mothlike around the stage during a concert (though I like that idea too); here cameras drift and crossfade every few seconds, further unmooring the fixed musical image from the visual experience, which it's true is distracting. But I'm a sucker for the novelty of a big surround mix. I love to feel engulfed by the image. I like how Neko's voice glows in the center channel as her signature reverb seeps like butter toward the surrounds. Ray's bass growls and swells and lays thunderstorm shadows across the whole right half of the room. Each instrument blooms with nuance and resolve that you just don't get out of two channels.

In a peculiar choice, New West has ditched the more common Dolby surround encoding for this disc. If your receiver don't do DTS then you're stuck with stereo, buddy. The 2-channel mix comes sampled at 48K in 24-bit resolution, a hair better than CD quality, but especially following a sitting with the surround mix, the stereo mix sounds to me cluttered and weirdly aggressive.

The Music

This year she added a full-time Tele picker and a drummer, but in 2003 Neko's touring band consisted of Kelly Hogan singing backup; John Rauhouse on banjo, steel and electric guitars; Tom V Ray on bass; and Tom V Ray's beard. They are a crack team, and their simplified arrangements open vast expanses inside these small simple songs. Who was it, Duke Ellington? Claude Debussy? Diddy? -- who said the music is the space between the notes? In the second half of this show, when Neko lays down her rhythm guitar, the emptiness at play between the warmer instruments in the ensemble sounds majestic.

Take "Buckets of Rain," a respectable cover of a respectable Dylan tune. The bass and tambourine, both manned by Ray, build a lazy ragtime while Rauhouse's Hawaiian steel guitar trickles blues around the corners. Neko, whose pitch frequently teeters when not on full-blast, delivers a nuanced reading without a falter. The music thrives on its emptiness.

Occasionally, yeah I miss the drums. "Deep Red Bells," Neko's furious elegy to the victims of the Green River serial killer -- her biggest-sounding song, with its gale-force chorus -- loses its thunder flooring here in a last-verse tempo change. And "Ghost Wiring," a perfect evocation I think of cold and rainy autumn twilight, misses fathoms of spookiness without the album track's dark gonging cymbals and the Sadies' ten-story high guitars. Rauhouse's rhythm banjo gives the tune a pleasant plodding feel that works against the chill conjured up in magic potion lines like "Crows curse and beat their wings" and "Your ghost is a lightshow at night on the Grand Coulee Dam."

The most effective tunes here are those culled from Neko's home-recorded Canadian Amp EP, pre-arranged for a small ensemble. All covers, all threaded through with despair rising to peaks of desperation. Which is good. "In California" about a disillusioned singer-songwriter in LA namechecks the Black Dahlia and dreams of snow. It stares at empty city streets all night, vocals rising and falling like someone trying to get out of bed. "Knock Loud," with Rauhouse grinding a furious tube-fuzzy rhythm guitar, is a depressive fever turned over and over in an empty room. And Hank Williams's tune "Alone and Forsaken" here grows huge and fiery and closes the show with a thrill of apocalyptic ruin.

If this review reads awfully innish, and you're uninnishiated, that's because the DVD doesn't offer a lot to folks who aren't fans. Live From Austin TX is a solid performance, but not the first step to Neko appreciation. Though fans looking to push a friend off the fence won't do much better than this performance of "Hex." If Kelly Hogan's soaring and bitter-honey harmonies don't put a tear on your pal's cheek, check her pulse.

At 40 minutes, the set is short -- fully a half-hour shy of Lucinda's ACL DVD. But it sticks to the ribs. I like about Neko that she cuts the vamping from her tunes, empty chord progression hemming and hawing. Her songs are bone and sinew, and short as they run, they cast long shadows.