Brian Wilson had cars and surfboards. Lou Reed had transients and smack. Neko Case, another instinctive songwriter with identifiable lyrical obsessions, has weather and animals. That's considerable symbolic acreage, yet Case -- like Wilson and Reed, to name a couple of past masters -- compresses detached observation and wet hunger into distinctive miniatures. (And her gift for melodic surprise rivals even the old Beach Boy's polished touch.) Tides and floods and tornadoes, tigers and foxes and b
