Although
the Green Pajamas first formed in the early '80s, their releases were sporadic at best through the first decade-plus of their career, and often on the tiniest obscure labels at that. Since 1997's Strung Behind the Sun, the Seattle-based group has become considerably more prolific, with an output averaging an album a year. The double-edged sword of consistency factors into
the Green Pajamas at this point: anyone who has been following primary singer/songwriter
Jeff Kelly for any length of time already has a very good idea of what
Box of Secrets: Northern Gothic Season Two sounds like long before the laser hits the aluminum. The guitars will shimmer and jangle, the vocals will be hazy and buried deep in the spacious mix, the lyrics will be abstract but with heavy religious overtones, and the overall vibe will be hazily psychedelic in a fashion that nods to rock's lysergic past without sounding specifically derivative of any single '60s-vintage band. Sure enough, that's a neat capsule description of the album, but there's a bit more urgency to
Box of Secrets: Northern Gothic Season Two than some of the group's more recent releases. Opening track "Katie's Gone" is one of
Kelly's most tuneful rockers in quite a while, a worthy successor to the state of unfulfilled yearning that dominates
the GPs' signature single, 1984's "Kim the Waitress." Similarly, the haunting gothic ballad "When Abigail Was 17," featuring ghostly interplay between an Appalachian banjo and
Eric Lichter's
Richard Thompson-like lead guitar lines, sounds like the Pacific Northwest's answer to
Liege & Lief-era
Fairport Convention. Early press for the album claimed it was a putative concept album about the bandmembers' childhood memories, but as always,
Kelly (and
Lichter and multi-instrumentalist Laura Weller, who provide three songs between them) is more interested in mood and compelling shards of imagery than telling coherent stories. This is no bad thing, because
the Green Pajamas have proven themselves masters of mood-altering psychedelic folk-rock, and other than
the Bevis Frond, there just aren't that many current bands out there who understand all three strands of that sound so well. So perhaps
Box of Secrets: Northern Gothic Season Two is primarily for committed
Green Pajamas fans, but those who aren't getting everything they need musically out of the
Devendra Banhart-led "weird folk" scene may be interested in hearing what happens when songcraft takes the place of willful eccentricity. ~ Stewart Mason