Customer Reviews

Songs in a Northern Key

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

In 1997 We called Anders Parker "an intuitive, emgerging classicist destined to carve out his own chapter." And so he does with Songs In A Northern Key, dancing drunkenly in the crevices between The Who Sell Out and the White Album while the ghosts of Nick Drake and Townes Van Zandt nod approvingly. A dense, arresting masterpiece equally steeped in alt-country, post modern phychedelia and shot-in-the-heart classic folk. -- Magnet Magazine

Must have been a bad day when I wrote this. I still think this album is over-produced, but, I can't quit listening to it. A lesson in why first impressions are not always accurate. It is dark, mature, contemplative, complex and gauranteed to catch your attention. No, it's not the V-Roys.
"I bought this album when I saw that Ray Kennedy had a hand in the mixing. Steve Earle's name was on one of the cellophane stickers touting this. Don't go here if you are looking for twang, alt-country or whatever you call it. This album is an over produced almagamtion of reverb, guitars, and that annoying hiss associated with artists trying to recapture (?) that LP sound. Wilco Summer Teeth on valium...or maybe ecstasy."

I don't give 5 star reviews very often, but this CD deserves it.


Varnaline was a very good band. Mr. Parker has never released a bad album. But this disc is something special. Not only is it heads and shoulders Varnaline's best album. In my opinion it's one of the best albums of all-time. Period. And it's terminally underrated. (If you're looking for another terminally underrated absolute classic, try the Grifters--Crapping You Negative).

The disc is one big high-point. There isn't a bad song to be had. While the primary sounds on the disc are acoustic guitar, bass, and gentle but thudding drums, the disc has a lot of range. While the obvious comparison to be drawn is to groups like Son Volt, Wilco, etc, this album is better than anything the aforementioned groups have released.

I got this CD after getting Sweet Life and this album seemed a little more uniform. With Sweet Life you had twelve songs, each one sounding different from the other, perhaps a little more of a group dynamic at work. With this CD, the songs tend to follow more of a consistent sound and that sound is excellent. I take it that this effort was more of a Anders Parker solo effort than Sweet Life. Heck, both albums are great, outstanding band and a really hypnotic sound.

I was in a record store when I heard this cd for the first time. I've had that happen before...something would sound so magical in the record store, but when you brought it home, well, somehow it wasn't so magical anymore. Not the case with this cd. I've become addicted to this cd faster than any before, and it's all I can do to refrain from playing it too often. No, I save it for the right time, like on a sunny fall afternoon.....load up the discman with fresh batteries, then take a nice long walk.....doesn't really matter where....this is aural ecstasy.

Anders has finally pulled it together and produced a stellar album from start to finish.

Varnaline's best feature is their individuality. They cut their own course with this music. It's strength is that it's quite different, not routine. The CD opens with "Still Dream," more arrangement than melody. "Song" is a dreamy wash of electric guitar. The organ is front and center on the slow plodding "Indian Summer Takedown," "Color me depressed, all my nerves got undressed." "Blackbird Fields" is a sad contemplative acoustic guitar track. "Blue Flowers on the Highway" is quite unusual, a midtempo track with crashing cymbals. A short instrumental interlude is titled "Drunken Wish," for reasons known to Varnaline. The next two tracks run together for me, almost indistinguishably. "Difference," with its dense arrangement and ponderous melody, flows into "Anything from Now." "Down the Street" has a chiming guitar that sounds like Tom Petty playing while seasick, "You were just a broken toy, a broken house with no more joy." "Green Eyed Stars" has more bashing cymbal and sounds like the band had fun testing an echo chamber. 41 seconds of guitar noodling is titled "Sister & the Chrome Waves." "I Don't Want" is another slow plodding track. "Let It All Come Down" is my favorite track, thundering slow motion guitar, heavy on reverb. "Broken Song" is a slow acoustic guitar piece with trite lyrics, "I am a young man, soon I'll be dead; if you were a rich girl, well, maybe I'd live." The CD concludes with "Murder Crow," an anguished folk melody that ends with the tinkling of a music box. "Songs In A Northern Key" is interesting because it's adventurous. It's not a happy album, perhaps best enjoyed for those excessively intoxicated with the blues.