SONGS FROM A SOLITARY HOME

Wow! Another album that came out of nowhere and completely caught me by surprise, Major Parkinson's second album, "Songs From a Solitary Home", is an excellent piece of music that will have a strong appeal to a lot of music listeners.

This album has a lot of strong songs, which is a distinction that I feel I must make because a lot of albums I listen to I rarely think about the individual tracks. Yet on this album, while it does sound best listening from start to end, I feel you can safely listen to any song on it's own and have a satisfying experience with it.

The music is largely based around the vocals, and Major Parkinson is one of the bands that pulls this off very well. Jon Ivar Kollbotn's voice has a very pleasant emotive aspect to it that in a way reminds me of Rikard Sjoblom of Beardfish; not so much for the sound of his voice (they are rather different) but more how his singing adds a whole level of character to the music and seems to convey the mood he wants with ease.

The music is unabashedly catchy when it needs to be, but it can also be quite tender (as in Card Boxes, a song that, if my interpretation is correct, is about the death of the protagonists parents), and the band can also effortlessly switch from the catchy to the more emotional (as on Solitary Home).

The content of the lyrics on this album are almost all dark, but with a sense of humor about them that prevents the music from being too bleak. The lyrics are also quite good, expressing emotion while leaving the specifics of the events for the listener to piece together for themselves.

This is a vocal driven, song-based album, but alas, this is not music that the radio stations near me are likely to be playing (although damn, I wish they would!). In fact, I had to e-mail the band to even get a copy shipped to me, for there are no North American distributors selling this music. The other option of course is iTunes. This is a shame, because these guys are flat out amazing and need to be heard by a larger audience.