The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You (Deluxe Edition)

On her sixth studio album, the incomparable Neko Case returns to the exquisitely dark, structurally complex, yet unfailingly lovely songwriting that made her 2006 landmark Fox Confessor Brings the Flood so transcendent. “Night Still Comes” is Case at her most achingly gorgeous, even while singing tormented lyrics reminiscent of Fiona Apple’s “Every Single Night” (“My brain makes drugs to keep me slow… but not even the masons know what drug will keep night from coming”). “Bracing for Sunday” finds Case singing matter-of-factly about murdering the man responsible for a friend’s death. “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu” is an appalled a capella lullaby to a child Case witnessed being viciously berated by his mother, while the darkly baroque “Afraid” gives us the gift of Neko covering Nico, the former Velvet Underground muse. Still, the album is not without lighter moments such as plaintive love song “Calling Cards” or the resilient, horn-swirling closing track, “Ragtime.”