Varnaline: Songs In A Northern Key

Anders Parker's Varnaline project has been variously incarnated as a lo-fi one-man band, an assemblage of pounding Crazy Horse-style rockers, a sparse acoustic group, and a collective of experimental-pop noisemakers. For Songs In A Northern Key, Parker returns to playing most of the instruments himself, producing an eclectic record that cycles through the moody twang, patchwork rattle, and waves-of-sound guitar-rock that have all been part of the Varnaline story to date. What ties the disc together, aside from the way the songs fade into each other, is a consistently disarming handmade quality. Parker isn't an especially remarkable songwriter, at least in terms of complicated melodic structures; he uses straightforward time signatures and simple chord progressions, placing the emphasis on vividly mysterious lines like, "What was that song they sung / the one where everyone came / and we all felt the same" (from the resounding "Song," one of the album's most immediately arresting tracks). Like several of the meaningful modern rockers of his mid- to late-'90s class, Parker uses the studio to bring color and shape to his minimal compositions. The teeter-totter pattern of organ, snare drum, and acoustic guitar that carries "Indian Summer Takedown," the clanging distortion that heralds the chorus of "Anything From Now," the tambourine that keeps the tempo of "Down The Street" in focus when the crashing cymbals begin to obliterate the beat—these are the elements that qualify as "catchy" on Songs In A Northern Key, much more so than Parker's doggedly earthbound hooks. By turning the production into the attraction, he emphasizes the artistic process, perhaps more than the finished product deserves. The effect is quaint, a bit like looking at the crude utensils that ancient humans fashioned out of dried bones and bark. Varnaline inspires a similar sense of wonder, more for the craftiness of Parker's mechanics than for their ultimate functionality.