Track Listings (15) - Disc #1| All Artists: Varnaline Title: Songs in a Northern Key Members Wishing: 0 Total Copies: 0 Label: Artemis Records Original Release Date: 1/1/2001 Re-Release Date: 7/31/2001 Genres: Alternative Rock, Folk, Pop, Rock Styles: Indie & Lo-Fi, Singer-Songwriters Number of Discs: 1 SwapaCD Credits: 1 UPCs: 699675107727, 742451023626 |
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Search - Varnaline :: Songs in a Northern Key
 | Varnaline Songs in a Northern Key Genres: Alternative Rock, Folk, Pop, Rock
Released in the wake of a trend among alt-country vets to tweak twang with summery pop, Varnaline's fifth full-length is no teenage symphony to God. If anything, Songs in a Northern Key takes the opposite tack: It's dar... more » |
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Amazon.com Released in the wake of a trend among alt-country vets to tweak twang with summery pop, Varnaline's fifth full-length is no teenage symphony to God. If anything, Songs in a Northern Key takes the opposite tack: It's dark, thorny, and full of mutterings about middle age ("My aching back is filled with jagged cracks"). Swamped with reverb, full of the drone of wheezy old organs and cranky guitar feedback, and recorded in faulty fidelity reminiscent of a Dinosaur Jr. disc, it's a clear sidestep away from Varnaline's broad, melodic 1998 album, Sweet Life. "Indian Summer Takedown" is a highlight and plenty catchy, but the balance of the album is dominated by brittle ballads ("Blackbird Fields," "Murder Crow") and noise rock ("Song," "Let It All Come Down"). Mostly a solo effort from Varnaline mastermind Anders Parker, Songs in a Northern Key is convincing proof that bleak is beautiful. --Anders Smith Lindall Similarly Requested CDs
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CD ReviewsHaunting... 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."" |
