Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (2006)

The restless protagonists on Neko Case's latest — and finest — album, Fox Confessor, are outsiders with a taste for dangerous romance and the knife's edge, wandering in a doomed landscape straight out of Faulkner. Elegies like ''Star Witness'' and ''A Widow's Toast'' sound spooked, as if they were recorded at the bottom of a well. Moving further away from her early alt-country sound has sharpened Case's songwriting instincts; her death-haunted folk casts a beguiling spell.