By now, Portland being famed for it’s ‘indie cred’ is old hat – everyone knows about the smart growth initiatives, all the bike lanes, Portlandia, etc. One of the most sterling examples of this is Music Fest NW, when bands play across the city’s many venues, with big name acts and small up-and-comers, Pacific Northwest locals and acts from around the world.
So QRO headed (north)West, Tuesday to Sunday, September 3rd to 8th.
Pioneer Courthouse Square
Neko Case
Being from Spokane, Washington, Neko Case has played in Portland enough times to know that a lot of the people who make up our fair city engage in a rivalry with our friendly city to the north, Seattle. She at least knows this enough to have prefaced one of her slower songs by saying, “This is a song about your favorite city, Seattle,” to which maybe twenty people in the crowd issues loud boos.
Helping to close things down for this year’s Music Fest NW, oddly but enjoyable enough, Case’s set was almost as much comedy as it was good music. Sure, there may have been more energetic ways to close down a festival until next year, but her brand of mellow country/folk rock fit the bill just fine. At one point her voice sort of gave out, and rather than making it into an embarrassing issue, after the song ended she just politely said, “I’m sorry, I had a balloon of cocaine in my throat,” to which the crowd roared with laughter.
There were a couple things that made her Pioneer Courthouse square performance more special than normal, the first was the fact that Sunday happened to be her 43rd birthday, and the second was that her newest album The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You just came out this past Tuesday and it made up a lot of the songs in her set. In light of the latter, hopefully she and her and will be back again for a full tour very soon.
