Steve Dawson – Sweet Is The Anchor

It had never crossed my mind that Chicago’s Dolly Varden is America’s answer to Squeeze until the release of this first solo album by frontman Steve Dawson. So many of the songs — from the opening “Temporary” through the string-laden “Love Is A Blessing” and the reflectively resolute “The Guilty Will Pay” — had me conjuring cover versions by Squeeze’s Glenn Tilbrook.

No, the reedy-voiced Dawson isn’t as supple a singer as Tilbrook (perhaps the finest pure pop vocalist ever), but Squeeze songs aren’t typically as adventurous or ambitious as Dawson’s. What they share are the melodic lilt, the bittersweet yearning, the occasional underpinnings of ’60s soul, and the seductive catchiness that insinuates itself within the listener’s ear and quickly takes full command of his brain waves.

Dawson wrote and sang almost all of Dolly Varden’s material, but he doesn’t attempt to duplicate the sound of a band here, instead treating the arrangements as aural experiments from a sonic laboratory, employing an array of effects with minimal outside support. The stripped-down approach calls all the more attention to the songs, and the songs are superb, from the self-laceration of “I’m The One I Despise”, combining a lyric that bites like Elvis Costello’s with a guitar that weeps like George Harrison’s, to the soulful affirmation of “I’ll Be Right Here”, to the Zen lullaby of “The Monkey Mind Is On The Prowl”.

Wife/bandmate Diane Christiansen provides vocal harmony on two cuts and Joel Patterson supplies pedal steel on two others, providing a link between the solo project and the countrier strains of Dolly Varden (who have a new album in the works as well). Yet the strength of the songcraft collapses the distinction between alt-country and really smart pop.