Anders Parker Live Preview: 12/14, Undertow
BY JORDAN MAINZER
Over the past few decades, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Anders Parker has transformed from making 4-track lo-fi fuzz rock (early Varnaline) to troubadour-land. It's the latter he's become known for, save for a short stint in the now defunct noise rockers Space Needle and a couple collaborations with Jay Farrar. Parker's latest album The Black Flight, released through his own label Recorded & Freed, is his most straightforward, yet personal album. Recorded as minimally as it was written, the acoustic guitar record is inspired by his great uncle Leslie, a fighter pilot in WWI who died during a dogfight. Its references to war, let alone "The Great War" specifically, are general, a humanistic emphasis on what drives us to do the things we do, how we remember, and how we're remembered.
Behind The Black Flight is a sentiment Parker shared about the album: "I hope that humanity someday finds a way to free itself from the seemingly endless impulse to kill each other." On opener "Don't Let Them Get You Down", he explores what compels people to join war: "I'm heading for the action / I'm looking for a fight / I need my satisfaction / Want to shoot out all their lights." The 10-plus-minute title track, built around intense strums and arpeggiated plucks, sports uneven structures and varying levels of repetition and intensity, as if to mirror the simultaneous predictability and unpredictability of violence. That is, though the individual battles may be different, it's a tale as old as time: Why we fight is often ambiguous, and, "the list of names is never done." Parker further pays tribute to those who survive and how they're shaped mentally for the rest of their lives on blues dirges "Killin' Man" and "A Way Back Home". Those who analyze war, he posits, still don't have the ability to capture the sheer absurdity of it all.
Thankfully, on a few tracks, Parker delves into what keeps us alive. Though fighting is nightmarish, he uses the positive connotations of dreams, too, the opportunity to fulfill our goals and desires existing beyond the scope of a surrealistic pillow. "I can't move the mountain looming, but I can climb a thousand miles," he sings beautifully on closer "A Permanent Wave", the lightness of his picking allowing echo and space to fill the void, the musical representation of tangible potential. And fluttery and sheepish but no less serious are "Northern Girl" and "One Last and Lonely Night", songs where love, or even just lust, are balms in a violent world. War or not, we're all gonna die, says Parker, so pick your side of the mountain and start climbing.
Parker is currently on an Undertow tour, playing at folks' houses throughout the country, including tonight in Chicago at 8:00 PM. The show is happening in the 60625 zip code (somewhere around Ravenswood, Lincoln Square, or Albany Park), and its location won't be revealed until you purchase tickets. At the time of publication, there are 25 tickets available.
