Songs in a Northern Key

Varnaline | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (July 31, 2001)
• Original Release Date: 2001
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Artemis Records
• ASIN: B00005MJW7
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #75,253 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Still Dream

2. Song

3. Indian Summer Breakdown

4. Blackbird Fields

5. Blue Flowers on the Highway

6. The Drunkard's Wish

7. Difference

8. Anything From Now

9. Down the Street

10. Green Eyed Stars

11. Sister & the Chrome Waves

12. I Don't Want

13. Let It All Come Down

14. Broken Song

15. Murder Crow

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Guaranteed to grow on you!, August 16, 2001

By 

Henry R. Jordan "robbie_rocker" (Fort Worth, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Songs in a Northern Key (Audio CD)

I first heard of this band when attending Steve Earle's Book Reading/Signing (Doghouse Roses) in Ann Arbor MI. Steve was asked if he thought there were any new artists worth keeping an eye (ear?) on. He named "Bare Jr", "Joe Henry", and a few others but lavished particularly strong praise on "Varnaline". So, being the impressionable feller that I am this was enough to cause me to buy this release.

Being recently signed by Steve to his E Squared record label I expected something that could be classified as "Alt Country". Not so! Personally I have a disdain for peoples need for applying "Labels" to music. While I can understand the need at times it has started to remind me of the Eskimoes and their 3982 different words for "Snow"! This release actually defies catagorization. So I suppose someone will invent a new label for it.

To put it bluntly this release is simply Awesome! It is not easily accessible but the effort required in listening is well worth it. As I have found to be true of most of my favorite music, repeated listenings bear increased reward! I have been listening to this CD almost constantly since it was released and I am still discovering new subtleties hidden within it.

This music is obviously made by individuals that take their music very seriously. "Atmospheric" is the word that keeps coming to mind. The music is dark and bleak but strangely optimistic. It can take you to places where you would dearly love to homestead if it were only allowed. Plaintive (at times Michael Stipish) vocals backed by a band that can alternate between a driving beat and cerebral noodling.

Check it out late at night, lights off, drifting away. A great Mini Vacation!! It takes a CD like this to remind me of why I fell in love with music in the first place. Thanks Steve!

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting..., December 18, 2001

By 

Rob Damm - See all my reviews

This review is from: Songs in a Northern Key (Audio CD)

While I certainly can't agree with characterization of this album as 'sonic mush', I also understand where a listener looking for the typical Ray Kennedy/Twangtrust sound would be baffled and disapointed by this record. Varnaline has almost nothing to do with country music--- or even rock music--- in any conventional sense. Those looking for clean and loud guitars, clear vocals and concise song structrure, look elsewhere. This album is probably unlike anything else Ray Kennedy has had a hand in engineering or mixing.

This is lo-fi chamber-country-pop --full of moaning organs, mixed-down, tuned-down guitars, ocassional strings and even horns. In many instances, the nuances of melody are not readily discernable, but in the darkness gleams Anders Parker's regret-drenched, cracking voice that at times reminds one of the Band's Richard Manuel. His lyrics are mostly goreous, elliptical and occasionally opaque. The sound is somewhere bewteen Will Oldham/Palace/et. al and Son Volt/Uncle Tupelo. The album opens up with repeated listenings. It is obviously influenced by Lo-fi, chamber-pop masterworks such as "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea" by Neutral Milk Hotel and "When your Heartstrings Break" by Beulah, but manages to be its own thing. When Parker sings with female accompniament, the results are often heart-paralyzing.

This record is made up of beautiful, bleak and slow stuff punctuated with epiphanies of innocence and light. It is possibly the penultimate late-night album--- the perfect chaser for heartbeak and whiskey. Parker, of course has no intererest in actually *mending* that broken heart, but occasionally elevating its suffering to the level of the rarefied and epic.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Buy copies for your friends, August 8, 2001

By 

"brannonc" (Knoxville, TN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Songs in a Northern Key (Audio CD)

After listening to this record, you'll wonder how Varnaline has labored in relative obscurity all these years. Songs in a Northern Key is guaranteed to top any discerning critic's year's-best list. Individually, every one of these songs is a treat, but taken together they constitute a disarmingly good whole. Like most great music, this is hard to categorize--a beautiful synthesis of pop, alt-country, and straight-ahead rock, moody and mournful and resigned and romantic all at once. I haven't been able to stop listening to it. Buy copies for your friends.