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Charlie Parr - Criminals & Sinners CD
What's the point in running a label if you can't indulge yourself once in a while with something you really love? Charlie Parr's music has been living in our stereo and we firmly believe it should be living in yours too. Charlie Parr is from the same Duluth, MN music scene that spawned the likes of Low, Blacked Eyed Snakes, If Thousands and Haley Bonar. His music delves deep into the back roads of American folk music. Even though there's hints of Robert Johnson, Nick Drake and Will Oldham in his playing it's the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music that is the biggest inspiration of this lonely folk music. Recorded live to 2 track and previously issued by Shaky Ray Records of Duluth who describe it on their website as their finest moment. This is music at its most honest, ragged and stripped bare of any frills however the timeless songwriting shines through.
Despite being a full length album, 'Criminals and Sinners' has made it to 21 in the Chain With No Name Singles Charts. Ok, it's not the UK Top 40 but we're still very proud.
Songs
- Asa Jones' Blues
- Lowdown
- Song For Loren B.
- Henry Young's Body
- I Wonder How Long Til I Can Change My Clothes
- Eli Green
- Troubled 'Bout My Mother
- Annie Melton
- Going Up The Country
Reviews
Mr Parr originally from Austin, can be found these days plying his trade in Duluth, Minnesota. Often compared to Mississippi John Hurt, throughout Criminals and Sinners, it easy to see why as his take on the blues does belie an uplifting text, in fact if you listen closely to the opening track Asa Jones Blues, you will find the same washboard blues like dynamic that Scouse urchins the Zutons are admirably peddling to an unsuspecting pop world at the moment. Unlike most blues / folk albums this actually rocks in places, take for instance the furiously rattling ragtime number Lowdown, or the muscularly fulsome sound of Troubled bout my mother.
Elsewhere your certain that he's sure watched a lot of prison trains rumble past in his time while walking the same soulful journey to man's desperate inner self, briefly found pausing at the same cross roads as once passed Robert Johnson, who swapped his soul for a dusty parchment with the blues template written upon it in blood. And there at those lonely crossings talked old times with the ghosts of Carl Perkins and John Fahey, the latter an evident influence, you can feel the presence filtering spectral like in the roots of every track especially on the gritty rolling canvas of I wonder how long till I can change my clothes. But then this isn't an album paying respects to the dead, tracks like Song for Lauren B, and Henry Young's Body, galvanize a real homely Dylan perspective, both replete with cascading rustic chords, the latter haunted by an exquisitely heart wrenching harmonica that just humbles you to the core, while on the springing hoedown of Going up the country, you'd swear your life away that Ry Cooder had sneaked in on the session via the back door.
Criminals and Sinners is simply timeless, frozen in a purist paradise. Why waste your time reading what I think just get out there and buy the damn thing.