Norfolk & Western - Hidden Railways in the Pacific Northwest

Maybe it’s not down to the existence of “Taoist” lodges hidden among its forests, but there’s definitely something that makes the American Pacific Northwest special from an artistic and cultural point of view. Once upon a time, the relatively mild climate and abundant food resources allowed dozens, if not hundreds, of indigenous peoples not only to settle in the region but also to develop a major artistic tradition that still survives today.

Over the past twenty years, that region – not exactly “critical” in size (Vancouver, Seattle and Portland combined don’t even add up to ten million people) – has nonetheless given rise to more than one generation of artists who have shaped the world of music over the last 20-25 years. First and foremost thanks to Seattle’s grunge scene, a singularity that went on to spawn offshoots still alive and well in 2016: to name just a couple, the riot grrrl movement (centred on Olympia, birthplace of Sleater-Kinney) and the alternative singer-songwriter tradition of Elliott Smith and Pedro The Lion. And let’s not forget the alternative rock of Built To Spill and Modest Mouse. In short, a true musical Eldorado.

The 2000s then carried the branches further, with emo songwriting and more traditional Americana increasingly merging, as the cinematic, landscape-steeped attitude of Elliott Smith encouraged the use of classic instruments within typically alternative settings (not just through the use of lo-fi as an emotional amplifier). This gave rise to a new scene, an important one within the so-called “indie-folk” landscape of the 2000s, centred above all on Portland (home to Decemberists and Loch Lomond).

Against this backdrop, there are numerous cult trajectories of minor groups who nonetheless served as breeding grounds for some of the indie scene’s biggest acts of recent years (Carissa's Wierd for Band Of Horses, Death Cab For Cutie for The Postal Service). Other trajectories, however, ended exactly where they began: such is the case of Norfolk & Western, active mainly between 1999 and 2009, and their frontman, Adam Selzer.

The Norfolk & Western project takes its name from a Virginia railroad (Selzer would even come to suspect it sounded too “Americana-oriented” and so hid it from his audience), and it was born when Adam moved to Portland and set up his recording studio, at first predictably unknown and all but deserted. He then called on a college friend, a certain M Ward, to record their first works: “Duet For Guitars” for his friend and Centralia for Selzer.

Certainly the album most indebted, aesthetically, to Elliott Smith and Sparklehorse, whom we nonetheless see merging with a powerful Young-esque epic quality on “The Dowery” and “Settle In”, within a chamber-rock given fresh choral energy. This is more or less the album’s backbone, though it stands as much as a document of a musical “changing of the guard” as a world unto itself, one of free and boundless artistic inspiration. Short interludes (“My Ambiguity Frustrates”, “Spanish Thoughts”, “Her Averah”) and longer ones (“Centralia (Washington-California)”, later echoed by Death Cab For Cutie in their single “I Will Possess Your Heart”) mark out the contours of an “environmental” Americana, in some ways similar to the explorations of Califone or the closer-to-home Phil Elvrum, but with a sharper emotional charge, in an America that becomes an emotional landscape before it becomes a site of intellectual discovery.

Even though, aesthetically and in terms of means, Centralia has all the hallmarks of a self-produced debut, with purely lo-fi fragments deliberately placed to jolt the listener out of their comfort zone (“Her Fond Creation True”, “Take Off Your Diamonds”), the album’s songwriting, paired with arrangements built from small flourishes of craft (be they tiny itches of noise or sweeps of violin), already reveals Selzer’s expressive talent. It’s a less extroverted talent than that of his contemporaries, with an understatement easily mistaken for sloppiness, especially on this debut, but one that belongs to an aesthetic code no less considered than that of overproduced or over-arranged albums – with an underlying attention to melody and to the identity of truly memorable songs, as shown by one of the album’s potential singles, the elegiac “The Absence Of Photographs”.

From this early songwriting period of a project that is nominally solo but has a decidedly collective soul also comes the following Winter Farewell, recorded for the first time with a proper band and, in a sense, allowed to develop beyond Selzer’s own control. Perhaps for this reason the album has a wandering, digressive character, also owing to the number of tracks and the somewhat excessive use of samples and long outros.

Beyond serving as a general outro to Centralia, the album stands as a work-in-progress document of the Norfolk & Western project’s evolution into a proper band, whose fruits would be seen in later releases. The album is made up of short songs, at times lacking any real resolution, whether in the writing (“The Evergreen”, “Local Posts”, lacking real progressions, as in “Hegira”) and/or in the arrangement (“Your Sunday Best”). In this context, the instrumental tracks lose the emotional weight they carried on Centralia, taking on instead the value of a testing ground for mutual exploration among the musicians.

Meanwhile, Adam’s studio began to make a name for itself, especially after recording the early work of Decemberists, whom Norfolk & Western would support on tour in the early 2000s, and whose members would in turn become part of Selzer’s project. It was a golden period, especially with the addition of a European tour alongside Sparklehorse, which would lead to the recording of what is perhaps the band’s masterpiece, Dusk In Cold Parlours.

Recorded mainly alongside Decemberists drummer Rachel Blumberg, the album thrives precisely on the ongoing dialogue between the two, whether instrumental or vocal. Selzer’s “environmental” spirit is fully honoured here, in this dusty setting of a frontier Americana, pioneering and essential: a twilight that illuminates cold parlours, indeed. However, the “power duo” backbone doesn’t give rise to the rough edges of Sin Ropas and Two Gallants, partly due to Selzer’s lighter songwriting touch (despite the Molina-esque outbursts of “Disappear”), and partly due to a rhythm that often settles into the most measured pace possible, as if making room for Adam’s arrangements, which seem to float, intangible (the feather-light piano touches and riffs of “Letters Opened In The Bar”). Every track holds superb flashes of inspiration, faint interjections of accordion and harmonica, distant echoes of slide guitar and piano, a drum part that is sometimes reduced to a mechanical background pulse, sometimes more clearly present. The album’s two instrumentals are perhaps its most memorable tracks for sheer inventiveness: the theatrical “Kelly Bauman”, full of exquisite sonic counterpoints, and the more conventional but powerfully evocative “A Hymnal”, almost reminiscent of “Ocean Songs”.

An Americana that tells of abandoned souls, but within a happily marginal society, like the lopsided yet rich community of the Pacific Northwest – and that’s how to read the caressing lightness of most of the album (“No Where Else He Can Go”), which smothers its spleen in pop (“Terrified”), taking flight into the childlike, existential poetry of Sufjan Stevens, drawing on his defenceless intimacy but also on his ability to arrange with colour while staying understated (“Oslo”, “At Dawn Or Dusk”, “A Marriage Proposal”).

Dusk In Cold Parlours, while bringing out the personal traits of Selzer’s music, is in short very much in tune with its era (1999 also saw “Down The River Of Golden Dreams”, “Transfiguration Of Vincent” and “Transatlanticism”, while “Lifted” came out the year before, as did “Castaway And Cutouts”). It seems that Selzer’s less “exuberant” character compared to his contemporaries is what unfairly relegated him to a supporting role, along with his continued attachment to alternative stylistic tropes that must have sounded less “new” even at the time (the final outburst of “Disappear”, the use of distortion and noise) – so much so that Hush Records’ own press release name-checks Dean Wareham and Yo La Tengo, artists who by then had already been around for quite some time. A number of factors that might explain the fairly modest success of the album and of Norfolk & Western’s career as a whole, which naturally mean little when set against a different horizon.

In retrospect, Dusk In Cold Parlours perhaps stands out even more for this very reason, for its grace and intelligence compared to its peers, like that classmate too grown-up for the others to care about trends. Its slow-Americana duets, “Letters Opened In The Bar” and “Impossible”, would remain a benchmark of quality for many who came after them.

If, however, we have to pick one album that best captures the “collective” spirit of Portland's chamber-folk scene and represents the true (sadly brief) transformation of the Norfolk & Western project into a proper band, it is unquestionably The Unsung Colony, released in 2006, three years after its predecessor. A “colony without singers” – the perfect image to capture this record’s place in the group’s discography, no longer the Selzer-Blumberg duo but a collective of some of the area’s finest musicians – even if none, essentially, were household names. Dave Depper, a multi-instrumentalist who over the years found himself collaborating with the best bands of the Pacific Northwest; Amanda Lawrence, cellist on essentially every album of the chamber-folk scene; and finally the now well-known composer/songwriter/musician Peter Broderick.

The Unsung Colony thus becomes the richest album of the bunch, with a series of arrangement insights that colour and give depth and substance to the ever-sharp songwriting of Adam Selzer.

The album's incredible playfulness gives rise to genuine small masterpieces, like "The New Rise Of Labor", a rollercoaster of melancholy and lightness, noise and delicacy, at times clashing, at times coexisting, with a marimba that seems to generate noise and a ukulele that chirps away, accompanying a track essentially built from a stack of overlapping solos. Other songs are decidedly more conventional, but the album's choral quality amplifies their emotional charge, as in the crescendo of the instrumental chamber-folk manifesto "Barrels On Fire".

While Dusk In Cold Parlours remains a work apart, born of particular recording conditions and a desire to depict an environment (figurative and/or physical), The Unsung Colony is the work that engages most directly with the Pacific Northwest chamber-folk scene and best represents its "alternative" spirit, in an artistic sharing that feels almost rebellious. The songs on the record are noticeably "caressed" by each of the musicians involved, without crowding anyone else out, each one instead offering a unique, personal contribution every time. "The Longest Stare" is one of the album's most fitting examples, another song that seems to change shape several times over: from an almost "classical" piano ballad to a driving "post" progression. Not to mention the interludes of "Arrangements Made", now explosive, now veering into improvised jazz.

The Unsung Colony is, in short, probably one of the most carefully crafted and best-arranged independent folk albums around, with a depth and texture that hold up even against an album by Wilco, to name a band that has made technique and "internal" dynamics one of its hallmarks, mannerism and all. Not only for the record's more collective character, but also for Selzer's decidedly more pop and narrative songwriting, The Unsung Colony is his album that comes closest to their Portland neighbours the Decemberists ("The Shortest Stare"), even brushing up against the tenderness of Sam Beam on "How To Reel In" — and in that sense it may well be the first, most immediate point of reference for anyone wanting to discover Norfolk & Western.

No less worthwhile is the long EP released the same year, A Gilded Age, in some ways more conventional and "rougher" than its LP counterpart, but no less full of life, helped along by a sound that leans even more Meloy-esque. With similarly "picaresque" moments ("Clyde And New Orleans", the title track) and a bigger vocal contribution from Rachael Blumberg ("A Voice Through The Walls", "Minor Daughter"), A Gilded Age comes across as decidedly less original and formally polished (even the six minutes of "Porch Destruction" are fairly linear), but it's not a disappointment in terms of songwriting, with a handful of tracks that don't feel like also-rans next to The Unsung Colony.

It does mark, however, the band's first attempt at edging toward midstream territory, with more impactful arrangements (the "power-folk-rock" of "We Were All Saints"), certainly very close in attitude to the rowdier side of the Decemberists ("Watch The Days Slowly Fade").

For those nostalgic for the stark, "alt" and understated charm of the band's early work, there are two compendiums of side material, If You Were Born Overseas and A Collection Of, the first released as a "tour album" in 2005, the second an even more obscure CD from 2009, though containing archival material dating back to the project's earliest days.

If You Were Born Overseas, besides a few tracks later featured on the official albums, also contains what sound like studio improvisation fragments between Adam and Rachael ("West Destination"), which capture all of the project's cinematic spirit — Polanski-esque on "Et La Reve Fraicht", more predictably "cold parlour" klezmer on "Song For A Shtetl". It's a record full of small gems, like the lo-fi, Dickensian little march "Edison", built around an accordion, or the minimalist emo-writing of "Something Less Obvious", and above all the confessional "Day One".

Even more steeped in a "nineties-core" spirit are the tracks on A Collection Of, with the slow-country of "Accents Of Praise", the Elliott Smith echoes of "From 1910", the unexpected East River Pipe-style indie-pop of "UK Humor", the blues-streaked, forlorn chamber-folk of "Black Rock", the country-core of "When I Sleep", and the Rutili-esque alt-country of "McCullum". Overall, this is certainly the most fascinating peephole into Adam Selzer's hidden world, into his influences and his original idea of music, one later reshaped by the arrival of the Portland scene and his new bandmates. But above all it's a window onto an intimate, emotional and spiritual world that reaches its fullest depth here, with a strongly Kozelek-esque streak even in the brief lo-fi interludes ("How's Your Life At The Altar?") or in the looming desolation of "The Recidivist".

"On Your Way To This", perhaps the centrepiece of the collection, with its roaring, muscular alt-country arrangement, exemplifies an artistic stance still indebted to another era but delivered with the class that has by now become typical of Selzer (also worth framing is the closer, the instrumental "porch song" "Wend", a hymn to suburban contemplation).

A Collection Of is, in short, the true hidden gem of Adam's career, and an even clearer demonstration of his talent.

The only real (and very relative) stumble under the Norfolk & Western banner comes with the band's latest work, Dinero Severo, which actually had all the makings of the band's breakthrough with a wider audience (though the silence with which it was met on webzines was deafening — it is, for instance, the first of their albums not reviewed by Pitchfork).

The swerve toward a much more conventional, backward-looking alt-country is decisive and jarring: "Hiding Home" sounds like a Neil Young track (which Selzer seems almost to be impersonating) reinterpreted by Wilco. The latter are indeed the record's true north star, as shown by the frazzled kraut-country of "Turkish Wine" and the half-tribute power-(country)-pop of "Opinion" (also worth mentioning is the big "Sky Blue Sky"-style ballad "The Long Goodbye").

The alternation between surface-level experimentalism (the stomping country-blues of "Whippoorwhill Song") and hyper-traditional arrangements ("Every Morning") belongs, however, to a more mannerist version of Tweedy & co. than the one from the early 2000s. In some way it's Selzer's songwriting that saves Dinero Severo, pulling out a few of his Elliott Smith-style tracks ("So That's How It Is"), though the sense that this time the arrangements overwhelm him creeps in often, as on the Belle & Sebastian-like "Not For Good".

For an artist and a band who had managed to carve out their own independent path and help shape a well-defined scene for devoted fans, Dinero Severo is one of the signs that they would not survive it.

Although not entirely extinct (Adam's website dates them 1999-2009, but there were a few "reunion" shows in 2013), Norfolk & Western today stand as one of the most precious shooting stars of the (pre-)chaotic 2000s. A band like any other for trend-chasers, but a goldmine of discoveries for anyone who truly loves music.

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