Varnaline's plodding but oddly-engrossing slowcore lays its tracks somewhere inbetween Son Volt and Bob Mould's Workbook. Undoubtedly, it can test a listener's patience. Rather than grabbing you with instantly gratifying hooks, Sweet Life gradually seeps into your subconscious through a lazy osmotic trickle.

Frontman Anders Parker's songwriting examines simple slices of bucolic life, as on the self-explanatory stargazer "Northern Lights," and "Saviors," a track about a man's desperate longing for escape from a damaging domestic purgatory. "Now You're Dirt" is a bottom-heavy hulk of a song with its grinding guitars bumped about by a pronounced rhythmic lurch.

Though at times the atmospheric touches on Sweet Life seem cold and blustery, eventually the band allows a little warmth to creep in and thaw things out. A ray of shimmering XTC pop shines its way through on "Fuck and Fight." And there's the casual sonic nod to the early-80's Athens music scene on "Underneath the Mountain." Many of the acoustic arrangements are eventually drowned by insurgent feedback strains, trombone, and classical strings; the title track begins as a virtuoso cello piece that's soon overpowered by a throbbing mass of My Bloody Valentine guitar fuzz, and Parker's vocals (which hint at Son Volt's Jay Farrar's weary, hangdog delivery) take on an uncharacteristically angelic quality as they rise above the thick instrumental hailstorm.

Although these tunes may not be hummable in any conventional sense, Varnaline infuse their addictive streams of slow-jam repetition with convincing melodrama. A Sweet Life is a rarity in the Great Irony Age that could, in less able hands, easily come off as self-indulgent, sappy sentimentalism.

-Michael Sandlin