Strangely, there’s no pizza to be found at St. Catherine and St. Laurent. There’s a storefront with “pizza” in the title, but it was closed last night at 8pm. So we had poutine at La Belle Province. I didn’t expect much from a chain – the interior had no charisma, but the cheese curds were real, the fries thick and greasy, the gravy passable, and the portion generous. We tucked in under baleful fluorescence and were satisfied. But this is not a restaurant review; this is a preamble. We were fortifying ourselves for the next four hours of standing in front of the stage just down the street at Club Soda.

The High Dials, who claim to hail from Montreal, opened. I like their rhythm section. The drummer wears extravagant muttonchop sideburns and attacks his kit with slack-jawed ferocity. The bassist is a small, geek with a mop top and a beard and an infectious, bouncy stage presence (he knocked over a mike stand with his flailing bass, for instance). He also plays the sitar, although I could barely hear it when he did so. I think he and Muttonchops should find a new lead singer and start a different band – they’ve got potential. Their current frontman is a surly, self-important man who croons breathily and unintelligibly and strums a guitar. When an audience member welcomed the band to the city, Crooner snarled that, Actually he was from Montreal, but thanks anyway. He may have been trying for dry humor but it didn’t communicate. To sum up, their sound was derivative of too many sources to name, but Pet Sounds and psychedelica come to mind. After a while their songs merged into one, onerous drone.

Neko Case isn’t derivative. She derives her music from some obvious sources – torchsongs, old country and western, underground rock, rockabilly, folk. You can hear Bob Dylan in her lyrics and Patsy Cline in her voice but even filtered through the antique reverb effect that evokes those big, lonely western landscapes, she sounds original and true. It’s hard to reach back into the past, burnish the old stuff and recombine it to make a new thing – most who try disgorge inconsequential retro fluff. Neko Case writes beautiful songs that summon old ghosts and her wailing voice has transport capacity: it send you out past empty, moonlit highways and spooky boomtown streets, into her distinctive province of lyric melancholy. She can also rock, and while I like her uptempo stuff, it’s the sad songs that stay with me.

She’s fun onstage, relaxed, gracious, generous, and she has curious and unexpected guest musicians: last time I saw her, there were lady wrestlers who turned out to be expert yodelers. This time there were four women from the Bulgarian Women’s Choir of Montreal. Their singing was hair-raisingly beautiful.

The backing musicians were pros. Among them I liked especially the lumbering but dexterous and very skilled mandolin/banjo player, and the grimacing guitarist who sported a Robbie Robertson scarf. It was one of the best shows I’ve seen and I felt, at times, the excitement of watching somebody who will someday be considered one of the greats of her time.