Strange Parlors (2005) – Jake Berry – A radical departure from Berry’s previous songwriting, Strange Parlors expands on what is possible in folk music. From a review by Jack Foley: “These lyrics are the result of a genuine but ‘alternate’ religious sensibility, in which Western religion is simultaneously a source of immense personal pain and, at times, a profound judgment upon others. The words ‘deep’ and ‘dark’ repeat.… But the main point is the music.… it is music as deep atmosphere. The music is like the score to a wonderful, surrealistic film noir: in a certain sense it is ‘background,’ pure atmosphere, bringing us not only into an alternate understanding of harmonic relationships but into, as Berry puts it in a lyric, ‘some other time.’ It is deeply mysterious, surprising, at times ‘wrong’ in its rightness.… His active imagination and his extraordinary willingness to experiment bring him into territory which is far ‘stranger’ than either fiction or science fiction: ‘it all comes down,’ he writes in a song titled from Ecclesiastes, ‘to a single motion / that takes your breath away.’” To download the tracks “Dark Water,” “Four Ways Round,” and “Vanities” click here.