Forgiven Now

It's happened — transfiguration complete. With its fourth album, Chicago's Dolly Varden has taken the formidable strengths of each recording — first evidenced way back in 1995 on Mouthful of Lies — and combined them in a seamless, breathtaking collection of rock and pop songs that embrace country music's gloriously complex heart without calling into play any of its cultural clichés, which have unfortunately been embraced by "alterna-twang" crowd over the past decade. Dolly Varden stands on its own as a rock band first. Part of the credit goes to the bandmembers' fortitude; they've hung on for seven years without a personnel change. Part also goes to the teaming once again with Nashville's Brad Jones, who worked with DV on 2000's Dumbest Magnets. But most of the credit has to go to the bandmembers themselves, particularly the dual front-person lineup of singers and songwriters Diane Christiansen and Stephen Dawson. Added to the mix on Forgiven Now is legendary Nashville session picker Al Perkins on pedal steel, adding a textured depth and dimension to the proceedings. While Forgiven Now displays a next step in terms of the band's growth and promise, it's a big one. The songwriting here has moved to a level where the excess is gone and the economy of language, instrumentation, and even hooks is given first priority.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the songs of Christiansen, who has focused her gaze on an acceptance of things as they are, without the need to do anything to manipulate them. Her song "Lotus Hour," for all its expressionistic and painterly imagery, is a spare and poignant paean to look toward a larger construct — that humans and their universe are limitless. With a droning series of acoustic guitars giving way to Eastern-tinged modal extensions, Christiansen sings to accept her realization that the universe is indeed much larger than her small working-class view and that, as a person, she has become aware that she is too. She accepts the sadness this awareness contains: "This is the lotus hour/It's time for us to leave/Float above the working-class houses and blossoming trees/This is the lotus hour/We are refugees from all the plans we've made/And all catastrophes/Touch everything in the room before we leave...." In the break, Mark Balletto's guitar screams above the fray as if acknowledging that, in the grain of her voice, this separation is painful. That track follows the title track by Dawson, whose Rolling Stones-ish country shuffle invokes the best of loose-wristed garage rock with the hammer-down emotion of Gram Parsons, as he sings of giving up resentments and anger. In his pronunciation and the slippery charge of the guitars — with rim shots and floor toms getting a workout by Matt Thobe — he gets to the bridge with Christiansen and they almost shout the "they are forgiven now" chorus with a joyous seriousness.

But there's more as in the Christensen/Dawson/Thobe collaboration "Wish I Were Here," which tells a story too true and weighty to recount here. But in its intertwining guitars and voices and its dreamy pace, it could have been in Mulholland Drive. Dawson's stone honky tonk number, "There's a Magic," is a nod to the Gram Parsons/Emmylou Harris collaboration, and the emotion pulled out of the tune between his and Christensen's voices is as real and true as water coming down the falls. And while there isn't one track here that doesn't warrant being written about, Dawson's "Time for Me to Leave," with it's shimmering 4/4 country-rock pulse, is a harrowing song of liberation after a final moment of illuminating realization. You can hear the brokenness in Christensen's voice and, amid the ringing entwining guitars of Dawson and Balletto and a B-3 pumping the changes, the brokenness is twofold: There's been too much abuse and heartbreak to remain in the current situation, but it's because of the heartbreak, and the light that gets in its cracks, that the opportunity arises. The most surreal track on the disc is Christensen's "1000 Men Like Cigarettes," with its chamber music silences, ambient guitar textures floating through the mix, and Dawson's lap steel shimmering in the background. Christensen sings, buoyed by acoustic and electric guitars: "Like you clowndog of perpetual sadness/Get up and change the sheets/How did you get relieved of all those years, forgiven, you find yourself here...." The final track, which will go unnamed here, simply has to be heard to be believed; it's one of the best rock & roll performances in a decade, and sends the disc out on a frenzied, souled-out note.

And therein lies the backbone of the record: its poetry. It shows up less and less on pop records these days and, when it does, it needs to be embraced and celebrated. But the poetry here is an experienced sense of creation. These songs come, to borrow from William H. Gass, the heart of the heart of the country. And that country is the country of the heart. The myriad emotions and rock & roll landscapes that are invoked here are claimed to be true in the moment they are sung and let go of, leaving them for the listener to decide on. No matter what happens with this band, ultimately the folks in it will be OK. Up to Forgiven Now, they've done good to fine records, have been in it for the long haul, and have earned fans and good press from the beginning. But this album will be with them long after Dolly Varden is a memory. This album will be the one others point to when talking about their contribution to contemporary popular culture. Here is passion and pain, the agony of lust and love, death, determination, and renunciation, all of it on a record, all of it presented with grace, elegance, and verve. This is art. Let us dance.