Neko Case's beautiful, atmospheric sixth album, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, marks a change for the former alt-country singer.

Fox is not a country album, even if it does have the sound of wide-open spaces. Its dozen songs are more like twisted folk, with vivid tales about wild animals and hunters and people whose lives go terribly wrong.

"They're cautionary tales based not so much on morality as on common sense," Case said in an interview before the album's release. "They can become absurd and funny, but still cautionary -- like you don't want to get eaten by the wolf, so don't do anything stupid.

"My family is Ukrainian, and I grew up with animals everywhere. We never felt like we owned them; we felt like they chose to live among us."

Case spent two years working on the album in Arizona with longtime collaborators The Sadies as well as Calexico, singer Kelly Hogan, guitarists Brian Connelly and Paul Rigby, Band keyboardist Garth Hudson and co-producer Darryl Neudorf -- in between recording her live release The Tigers Have Spoken and working on Twin Cinema with The New Pornographers. And though her first couple of albums contained lots of covers, she's been steadily developing a unique songwriting style ever since, and wrote or co-wrote all of Fox's songs.

"I'm not the most prolific songwriter," she said. "I'm very distractable, and the other projects took a lot of energy. Sometimes I'm all over the map, so I have to rein myself in.

"Basically, the only way you can make music that's unique is not to think about it too hard. You have to trust that your self will come through. I'm uneducated about music in terms of scale and structure and terminology, so I don't know what's possible and what isn't, and that can be good. Sometimes the guys will come in and say, 'What made you put that chord with that chord?' And I'll say, 'I don't know, it just seemed to work.' And they laugh at me, but lovingly."

Neko Case plays the Music Hall Sunday.