Search - Varnaline :: Songs in a Northern Key

Haunting...

Rob Damm | 12/18/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"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."

Magnet Magazine's 20 BEST ALBUMS OF 2001.

brannonc | 01/23/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"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"

"Sonic Mush" Revisited

brannonc | 11/01/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"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.""