Neko Case - The Tigers Have Spoken

Neko Case's The Tigers Have Spoken is a 2004 live album that catches one of alt-country's great voices in full, fearless flight, backed by the Toronto band The Sadies.

By the early 2000s Case had built a devoted following with her own songs and her work with The New Pornographers, and this set shows why. Recorded on stage, it mixes a few of her own songs with a carefully chosen batch of covers, each one bent to fit her spine-tingling voice and the Sadies' twangy, rough-edged backing.

"If You Knew" opens the record with a tender ache, and "Hex" smoulders with quiet menace. Her version of the Shangri-Las' "Train from Kansas City" turns girl-group drama into a rollicking country stomp, while Loretta Lynn's "Rated X" gets a sly, knowing delivery that honours the original's wit.

Across the album the band plays with an easy, almost reckless chemistry, and Case's voice rings out like it could fill a cathedral or a dive bar with equal ease. The Sadies' guitars twang and snarl in all the right places.

Raw, warm and occasionally hair-raising, this is Neko Case caught somewhere between honky-tonk and gospel, and it bottles the electricity of the kind of night people still talk about years later.