Lovers

Carolyn Berk's songs are bruised with an impossible sentimentality--every couplet is a romance, marred with an awkward nostalgia for everything in its wake. Sort of like with real lovers, I suppose. Strange, that. With Lovers, Berk's occasional band, every body part - from wrist to gums - becomes a landscape of locked memory. A landscape that she traverses with a literate, evocative grace - somehow transcending the sap that inherently mires the subject matter of love, loss, hopelessness, and everything else mediocre songwriters tend to muck up. With The Gutter and the Garden Berk reconfirms the lyrical prowess initially established with the band's criminally overlooked predecessor, Star Lit Sunken Ship - expanding her disheartened vision with a peppering of conditional optimism. As dreary and droning as ever, The Gutter and the Garden expands the band's sonic scope ever so slightly - minor becomes major a little more often, arrangements elaborated - while maintaining the slight Southern sensibility that grounded their previous effort.
- Zac Pennington, The Stranger (April 2004) - The Stranger

Some albums, like dreams, or some books, possess a perfect, powerful, unshakable internal logic that evaporates in daylight. This is one of them. I've found myself telling people that Lovers are simple and pure, even though their music is anything but. Tender manifestos and lullaby fables for surrealist romantics, Carolyn BerkÕs songs are full of breathless melancholy and a sinking, infinite sadness. In them you hear hints of the circus-funeral magic-realist run-on folk song of Neutral Milk Hotel, the dreamy twilight grandeur of Mazzy Star, Bright Eyes' last-gasp heartstring soliloquies, and the ghost-haunted majesty of Magnetic Fields' loneliest highways. But IÕll be damned if Berk isnÕt a more entrancing spell caster than any of them.

The group are from Athens Ñ though Berk has been splitting her time between there and Boston recently - and this is their second CD. A traditional quiet-rock quartet here fleshed out with an Elephant 6Ðstyle mutant orchestra of muted trumpets and treated banjo and strings and subtle tape manipulations, Lovers are tragic and unbound by skin or soul. In "Now That YouÕre a Ghost" and "No Words Allowed" - the latter could be Kansas's "Dust in the Wind" if it had been written by Jeff Mangum for Chan Marshall - Berk fashions cemetery-pretty fairy tales out of nothing more immaculate than the notion that true love is stronger than death. But the most spectral corners of Starlit are the songs, like "Winter Takes a Lover" and the opening "I Believe in Outer Space," that hold out the possibility that all of us, every living thing and a great many non-living things to boot, eventually meet the thing that completes us best, even if we don't get to keep it.
- Carly Carioli, Boston Phoenix (October 2002) - The Boston Phoenix