Neko Case

Event Calendar Box Office Info McMenamins Home 565 Broadway, Tacoma, WA 98402 spanishballroom.com Calendar Box Office Venue Info Elks Temple Calendar Box Office Venue Info Elks Temple Thursday, 12 November 2026 McMenamins Presents Neko Case Team Dresch 7pm doors, 8pm show All ages welcome Share this event Add to Calendar Tickets About Neko Case Every handful of years, Neko Case resurfaces with a new album and reminds listeners that she is one of our greatest living songwriters - perpetually becoming more fearless and adventurous. "She has cultivated one of the most distinctive voices in American song," Stereogum declared. "Her albums unravel like musical picaresque: restlessly digressive, bluntly funny, strange - but never in ways you'd anticipate." The Grammy-nominated iconoclast's ninth LP, Neon Grey Midnight Green, is her biggest-sounding and most intimate-feeling album yet. Released last fall to immediate critical acclaim and declared an essential album in her catalog, the album was laid down live with a full band.

More "in the room" than any of her past work, even breaths and shirt-sleeve rustlings were kept in the final mix as a reminder that "humans were here." "There are so few producers who are women, nonbinary, or trans," says Case, who identifies as gender fluid and uses she/her pronouns. "People don't think of us as an option. I'm proud to say I produced this record." Today she is announcing a new run of 'Neon Grey Midnight Green' tour dates that begin this fall on the East coast and end with two shows in Case's hometown of Tacoma, Washington.

Website: https://nekocase.com/ X: https://x.com/NekoCase Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nekocase/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nekocaseofficial/?hl=en About Team Dresch To say Team Dresch were/are a political band is to miss the point. As they reminded in their great 1996 epistolary anthem "To the Enemies of Political Rock," not singing about causes is a political statement, of acceptance of the status quo.

In "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" America, Team Dresch did not have the luxury of complacency if they wanted to sing about the most basic of lyrical themes: Love. For four young women who love other women, choosing whether to sing their hearts out "can feel like a choice between pleasure and existence," as Jody Bleyle evocatively expressed in "Political Rock." Or, as they sang a little less politely in the same song: "Just own it you little slacker fuck." Listening to Team Dresch's 1990s albums and singles two decades later, I'm struck by the way in which they've gained, not lost, power.

Combining the brazenness of Riot Grrrl with the angst dirge of grunge, Team Dresch didn't just raise the stakes of queercore: They created two near-perfect albums about longing, freedom, and belonging over guitar riffs as epic and intense as Bleyle and Kaia Wilson's poetic couplets. In the hands of Janis Ian or k.d. lang, or Tegan and Sara, songs like "She's Crushing My Mind" and "Yes I am Too But Who Am I Really?" might have been ballads.

Inspired by punk and metal, Team Dresch played them as bone crushers. Beginning with their self-naming, Team Dresch celebrated singularity and camaraderie.

Guitarist and bassist Donna Dresch was the indie-rock legend (Screaming Trees, Dinosaur Jr., Fifth Column, etc.) under whose ax they united, but they carried the ball down the field together, passing lines, leads and instruments back and forth. They were all experienced musicians - Jody drummed for Hazel, Kaia had been in Adickdid, Marcéo Martinez in Calamity Jane - and brought a level of serious musicianship to the primitivism of Olympia's DIY scene.

On their 1995 debut, Personal Best (named after the movie starring Mariel Hemingway), they raged against the Christian right and small towns, then kissed their girlfriends on the mouth. Dresch, Bleyle, and Wilson played ferocious, intricate riffs fast while Martinez hit the drums hard.

Their lyrics cited the Smiths and Sinead O'Connor, patron saints