Neko Case

Live music and more, tonight through Thursday, compiled by Shaun Brady, Tom Di Nardo, James Johnson, Sara Sherr and Jonathan Takiff. POP . . . plus "Weird Al" Yankovic: In this age of instant, YouTube postings, 50 wiseguys may beat "Weird Al" Yankovic to the punch with a parody of a new song, he pointed out recently. So the dude's given up on being first, focusing simply on being the best in lyrical cleverness, arranging and visual embellishment. Catch it all, onstage and in glorious 3-D!

Neko Case is no dainty country princess. Can't imagine some Nashville-size songbird ceding the spotlight to a burly lap steel player while sneaking offstage for a break as Case did Saturday night at the Trocadero. Case's bathroom respite arrived midway through a set so captivatingly mellow, even the back-of-the-room stragglers kept the conversation to a minimum so as not to miss a reverb-soaked utterance. (Except for that couple exchanging heated words as "I Wish I Was the Moon Tonight" drifted over the room on a cloud of dark twang.

Some artists break the rules, others rewrite them. Some find their voices in acts of rebellion, some operate on the fringes because that's where they're from. Neko Case, a quiet maverick with an intrepid alto and no use for standard procedures, didn't select the outsider's life. Her fixation on detail is no more a matter of aesthetics than the scarcity of food on her childhood dinner plate was a matter of choice. That Case's memory of a loved one's death boils down to a fleeting image of the hem on her nightgown is telling: The beautiful, haunted songs on her country music albums are made of just such odd, earth-shaking snapshots, and they offer the same sort of strange comfort Case found years ago in the dark, in her room, with the radio on. "If you think about it it's crazy, that somebody you've never met who writes a song could save your life," said Case.

Here's the problem with modern country music: It stinks. Sorry to say, there's no more elegant way to diagnose the problem. Long ago, the soul of the tradition that spawned the likes of Hank Williams and Patsy Cline was sold off to the highest bidder, diluted into suburban rock music wearing a cowboy hat, and used to sell beer and pickup trucks. Thankfully, there is a whole emerging movement peopled with young twangers who are looking to steal the torch back. Take for example Saturday night's exemplary bill of Neko Case and Kelly Hogan at the Upstage.

My Morning Jacket / Neko Case My Morning Jacket and Neko Case share a deep, abiding appreciation for the power of reverb. Case and MMJ's Jim James (or, as he now prefers, Yim Yames) possess two of the most flexible and dynamic voices in rock; their voices soar like Roy Orbison's, and they soar higher on the wings of the almighty reverb. Both MMJ and Case have developed from alt-country beginnings into something more mystical and wide-ranging, MMJ working elements of soul, reggae, and catchy pop into their guitar jams, Case favoring torch songs and fablelike narratives (she saves her power-pop proclivities for the New Pornographers)

On "That Teenage Feeling" from Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, Neko Case sings about holding out for that unconditional, unquestioning devotion, that youthful feeling of being transported outside oneself by another person. In a voice that's more nuanced and seductive than when she sings with the indie rock group New Pornographers, Case gradually climbs to her upper register for some trills that thrill. The song is spacious, but bathed in reverb, like a classic girl-group ballad or a Platters record.

Kelly Hogan called her second solo album Beneath the Country Underdog for three reasons. First, says the suave country-jazz-soul singer from her home in Chicago, "it has the word dog in it. And I am a dog lover. " The barking of golden retriever-rottweiler mix Augie and title of her 1996 Whistle Only Dogs Can Hear attest to this. Second, it's a reference to Beneath the Underdog, the autobiography of jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus. "That was a favorite of my friend Robert's from the Jody Grind [her former band]

On Electric Version (Matador), Vancouver's New Pornographers overload each ultra-catchy song with buzzing guitars, whirring keyboards, and soaring harmony vocals. It's almost too much of a good thing, but songs such as "The Laws Have Changed" and "Testament to Youth in Verse" offer an irresistible sugar rush of over-the-top pleasure. "They would probably be considered relatively tasteless if you didn't actually care about them," says Neko Case, one of the band's three lead vocalists, on the phone from Arizona.

The New Pornographers create over-the-top pop built from zippy power pop guitars, buzzing retro keyboards, and layered AM-radio vocals. The compact songs usually contain three or four distinct sections, but they don't build: They detonate. At the packed Trocadero Friday, the Vancouver-based band fired off 18 blasts of high-spirited ecstasy, but only some of the band members seemed to enjoy the experience. The band split evenly between the dour (guitarist Todd Fancey, bassist John Collins, keyboardist Blaine Thurier)

Get ready to cry in your beer in style tonight with Neko Case, Kelly Hogan, Case's fellow Corn Sister Carolyn Mark and Bloodshot Records' Jon Rauhouse, who was last heard on the latest Pine Valley Cosmonauts album (7:30 and 10:30 p.m., Tin Angel, 20 S. 2nd St., 215-928-0978, www.tinangel.com, $15). The Statistics, the new band featuring Desaparecidos founder Denver Dalley, makes its Philadelphia debut at the Church with Rilo Kiley and M. Ward & Four More (7:30 tonight, 2125 Chestnut St., 215-6356, $8, all ages, www.r5 productions.

My Morning Jacket / Neko Case My Morning Jacket and Neko Case share a deep, abiding appreciation for the power of reverb. Case and MMJ's Jim James (or, as he now prefers, Yim Yames) possess two of the most flexible and dynamic voices in rock; their voices soar like Roy Orbison's, and they soar higher on the wings of the almighty reverb. Both MMJ and Case have developed from alt-country beginnings into something more mystical and wide-ranging, MMJ working elements of soul, reggae, and catchy pop into their guitar jams, Case favoring torch songs and fablelike narratives (she saves her power-pop proclivities for the New Pornographers)

He was one of rock's most charismatic showmen as the manic front man for the party-hearty J. Geils Band, and since then he has matured gracefully into a solo artist who, like his blues, soul, and country heroes, is built for the long haul. Peter Wolf, however, sees himself a little differently. "I don't consider myself really a musician. I'm just a fan," says the singer and songwriter who started out as a DJ. "And to be able to work with great engineers, great musicians, and great songwriting collaborators - those are the things that inspire me. " The 64-year-old Wolf, born and raised in the Bronx, was talking from his longtime home of Boston about his excellent new album, Midnight Souvenirs, released in the spring.

Live music and more, tonight through Thursday, compiled by Shaun Brady, Tom Di Nardo, James Johnson, Sara Sherr and Jonathan Takiff. POP . . . plus "Weird Al" Yankovic: In this age of instant, YouTube postings, 50 wiseguys may beat "Weird Al" Yankovic to the punch with a parody of a new song, he pointed out recently. So the dude's given up on being first, focusing simply on being the best in lyrical cleverness, arranging and visual embellishment. Catch it all, onstage and in glorious 3-D!

In 2009, music began to seem more and more like sports. Most of the events that got people talking, and tweeting, happened off the playing field - and at awards time. Chris Brown beat up Rihanna before the Grammys, Kanye West picked on Taylor Swift at the MTV Awards, and Adam Lambert took things to controversial extremes by acting out on the American Music Awards. The biggest story of the year was the death of a pop megastar 20 years past his prime. And, like Michael Jackson, the omnipresent stars who dominated the pop scene did it with music that wasn't actually released in 2009.

A tomboyish siren with a thick red mane and leather lungs, Neko Case is equal parts gender warrior and indie aesthete. That potent hybrid is aptly evoked by the cover of her new album, Middle Cyclone. She crouches for the photo in a Joan-of-Arc-atop-a-muscle-car tableau. Case is also in possession of what is arguably the greatest voice of her generation ? clarion in tone, transnational in its reach, and bottomless in its capacity to transmute wryly observed public fictions into inescapable private truths.

From the back of the Trocadero on Friday night, it would have been easy to mistake indie-rock band New Pornographers for the cast of an off-Broadway musical. Numbering as many as 10 and never fewer than seven, they crammed a profusion of guitars, keyboards and a couple of drum kits onto the Troc's stage, with enough room for a flute player and a glockenspiel. Led by Carl (A.C.) Newman, who favors falsetto leaps and lyrics that are at once cryptic and colloquial, the Pornographers have become something of a movable feast.

Rufus Wainwright has always known he's a star. The poperatic son of folk-music royalty - his divorced parents are autobiographical troubadour Loudon Wainwright III and Canadian songwriter Kate McGarrigle - began touring with his mother and her sister, Anna, when he was 13. After he released his first album, Rufus Wainwright, in 1998, the piano-playing singer and songwriter, who plays the Mann Center for the Performing Arts on Friday, with...

On albums such as Transistor Radio and End Of Amnesia, M. (Matt) Ward creates an intimate, outside-of-time world, rife with mortality, nostalgia, and late-night musings. Ward's murmuring, slightly raspy tenor slides easily into falsetto, and he often sounds like he's singing to himself, finger-picking his guitar alone in a dark room or leading a loose after-hours jam session. Although he interjects an occasional upbeat singalong and invites friends such as Neko Case, Rilo Kiley's Jenny Lewis, and My Morning Jacket's Jim James to join in, those communal experiences are diversions before Ward returns to his captivating laments.

Neko Case is no dainty country princess. Can't imagine some Nashville-size songbird ceding the spotlight to a burly lap steel player while sneaking offstage for a break as Case did Saturday night at the Trocadero. Case's bathroom respite arrived midway through a set so captivatingly mellow, even the back-of-the-room stragglers kept the conversation to a minimum so as not to miss a reverb-soaked utterance. (Except for that couple exchanging heated words as "I Wish I Was the Moon Tonight" drifted over the room on a cloud of dark twang.