The #6 Album On The Tulip Frenzy 2013 Top Ten List ™ Is Neko Case’s “The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You”
When asked to name our favorite American writers, we would put Neko Case up there with Thomas McGuane and Thomas Pynchon. When asked to name our favorite singers, she’s in a category of, if not one, at least on the tippy top shelf. We loved this album when it was released at summer’s end, and think it is her finest work, not including some of the high points of The New Pornographers sonic output.
When it came out, we said this:
“Lest you think, from the title, that Neko’s joined Fiona Apple’s ranks, The Worse Things Get… is the least baroque, most straight ahead rock’n’roll album of her distinguished solo career, even as it retains all of the complex folk song structures we’ve grown to love. For someone who was introduced to most of the world through the high camp pop dynamics of the New Pornographers, Neko’s solo albums have always been something way different, as different from those albums as Utah’s Dirty Devil River is from Vancouver Harbour. We have loved Neko’s voice from the first moment we heard it, but if you had to mark the moment it truly captured our heart, it was actually when she sang backup to Sally Timms on the Mekons’ “City of London” on Journey To The End Of Night. There was just something about the emollient power of her vocals that lassoed our left ventricle and yanked. But there was such a leap between the pop dynamics of her early role in the New Pornos, which eventually morphed into true co-equal status with A.C. Newman, and the solo albums she recorded with the likes of Calexico and Giant Sand, that while we admired the raw ambition of her songwriting, we didn’t really love the albums. They were work, punctuated by some songs so great you immediately created a new playlist just to have them star on it.
Even on the great Blacklisted, in which Neko’s funny, marvelous lyrics seemed like a beautiful woman spouting Kant, just to show she’s not just another pretty face, we found the music slow going. Again, the metaphor to torture is these songs were often like a creek in the beautiful high desert compared to the easy and torrential flow of the Columbia, up there in the geography of the New Pornographers. We didn’t much enjoy Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, though Middle Cyclone took on some of the aspect of her satisfying solo album, The Tigers Have Spoken, on which, with a great live band, she kicked ass. We played Middle Cyclone a lot. But since we’ve downloaded The Worse Things Get, we can’t stop listening to it — an indicator this is something different, something a little easier, poppier, and yeah, better.”
To our ears, it has only gotten better in the subsequent months.
Tulip Frenzy 
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