Anders Parker’s work, under the solo/group appellation Varnaline, has always been a study in contrasts, regardless of his decision to work alone as an acoustic act, or in tandem with his bassist brother John Parker and drummer Jud Ehrbar. Varnaline’s 1996 debut, Man Of Sin, was Parker, a four-track, an acoustic guitar, and a notebook full of evocative and plaintive songs. Last year saw a pair of Varnaline releases, the full-band treatment of the self-titled follow-up, and the return to sparseville of A Shot And A Beer. No matter the setting, the common thread has been the stellar songcraft of Anders Parker.
Sweet Life, the fourth Varnaline disc in two years, finds the pendulum swinging back toward a full-band treatment, and the sonic palette is broadened once again. Where A Shot And A Beer had an alt-country atmosphere and a brittle emotional vulnerability, Sweet Life is a blend of all the ages and stages of Neil Young with residual traces of his former band Space Needle’s aggressively ambient weirdness. Parker has always walked a fine line between raw folk and heartland rock and pure singer-songwriterisms, all layered with the baroque trappings of art rock.
The album’s openers, “Gulf Of Mexico” and “Northern Lights”, offer a lo-fi acoustic vibe that sniffs in the direction of Pavement, but Parker’s use of Mellotron and synthesizer suggests a couple of Moody Blues albums in the collection somewhere, while the songs’ hooks are clearly from the Beatles’ portfolio. Parker creates an amazing tension on Sweet Life as these high lo-fi, countryesque/prog, sweet/sour cross-currents mingle and meld to create a unique entity out of disparate materials.