PrettyFakes

One of the albums I was surprised and disappointed to find myself not writing about this year is the latest, self-titled release from former Varnaline main-man Anders Parker. I wrote about Parker’s previous solo effort, Tell it to the Dust, a while back and with much appreciation. The new record, I’m sad to say, isn’t doing it for me—though I hasten to add that this isn’t necessarily because it’s a bad album. Parker’s problem is mostly out of his control: he recorded one of my all-time favorite albums under his Varnaline moniker, Songs in a Northern Key.

There was a time when I didn’t shut up about this album, a period that covers, roughly, the first half of this decade. In some ways it’s the album that made a music nerd out of me, the first one whose virtues I trumpeted and whose obscurity I decried, the first one that sent me raiding used bins real and virtual in search of out-of-print back catalog items, side projects, and rare compilation tracks. I remember reading about Songs in a Northern Key in an issue of No Depression and talking about the band with Regulator (he who ushered me more deeply into the world of alt-country and folk and bluegrass) in the basement of Knoxville’s Neyland Stadium, where most Mondays in the fall we were greeted with a fresh coat of surely carcinogenic debris, a black grime, shaken loose from the ceiling by 200,000 stomping feet the the Saturday previous, that covered our coffee cups and keyboards and freshman comp portfolios. Based on his positive review of the band, I bought the album sound unheard, and lo, I was rewarded richly.

It’s an easy album to get obsessed with: Mostly composed of eerie, wistful ballads, but speckled here and there with wide-eyed rock numbers that sound hopeful and rueful all at once, and held together with atmospheric interstitial tracks. Parker plays nearly every instrument on nearly every track, and the result is something both lonesome and inspiring. Some songs sound like Parker dueting with his own ghost; others sound like he’s conducting an impromptu exorcism. It’s a record that gets better the longer and louder you listen to it: I’ve heard it a thousand times, but was still brought up short today by the piano bubbling under the bridge of “Down the Street.” You get the impression that Parker captures some of the sounds drifting in and out of the gaps of these songs by leaving a tape recorder to run all night in a haunted house, returning to retrieve it only in the glare of noon and damp with holy water to boot.

And yet, despite my fascination with Songs in a Northern Key, I haven’t listened to it much these past couple of years. I suspect this has everything to do with the weather. It’s the perfect album for late fall, for the short-but-never-long-enough stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas; it’s just the right soundtrack for all the lonely-crowd ambivalences the holidays evoke. The ambivalences I still have, but “late Fall” is just a figure of speech down here on the bayou, where the leaves drop from the trees only out of boredom with the endless succession of 72-degree highs. The songs on this album reveal themselves most clearly in crisp, brittle air, as opposed to the air we have here, so wet that gills are an inevitability of evolution. It’s a record for thermal socks and ice scrapers, for waking up when you realize you’ve set the heat five degrees too high, and you think about your heating bill, but then you decide what the hell, let it run.

I feel like I’m making the album sound like a bit of a downer, but that’s not quite right: the tone is less of resignation than of resolve, the sound of someone who can’t go on realizing, in the dim glow of whiskey-warmth, that he must go on.

Northern Key is better than anything Parker has done before or since, though that’s not to say that others of his albums are not worthwhile. In addition to Tell it to the Dust, I still return over and over again to the noisy, harrowing 4-track folk-rock of Man of Sin, and the other two Varnaline albums—a self-titled release and the sometimes sublime Sweet Life— offer peaks aplenty to compensate for their occasional valleys. You can download Varnaline songs here. The one track available from Northern Key, “Song,” is a good one but like all the songs on this album it works best in the context of the album entire, where it is preceded by the music-box lull of “Still Dream” and followed by the nearly perfect “Indian Summer Takedown,” which I’m providing for a limited time here.

So if you’re in need of last-minute gift ideas for music-lovers in cold climes, or if you want to try to make it feel like Winter through sheer force of will, you could do a lot worse than Songs in a Northern Key.

Oh, and I understand that Parker is also recording with Jay Farrar under the name “Gob Iron.” Haven’t heard it. Hope it’s great.

BARELY RELATED: Speaking of last-minute gift ideas, those of you with book-lovers to shop for should head over and check out the 2006 Underrated Writers Project at the great Syntax of Things. Gift ideas galore for others and yourself!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Professor Fury, The Rock and The Roll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.