The International Submarine Band (Gram Parsons) Safe at Home LP (Mono)

TAS Rated 4/5 Music, 4.5/5 Sonics in the February 2023 Issue of The Absolute Sound!

This all-analog promenade through the seminal 1968 album by Gram Parsons' International Submarine Band is widely regarded as the record that launched the country-rock movement and was the first album to spotlight Parsons' charismatic vocals and visionary songwriting.

Often relegated to a footnote in Parsons' career, Safe at Home remains a foundational text in country-rock, laying out the parameters of this new subgenre and influencing subsequent generations of artists - country outlaws, alt. country punks, Americana string-bands, and Nashville insurgents. But it's more than just an artifact, and it's more than just the first confident effort by a restless artist who was hailed as a hero only after his untimely death. Safe at Home is, at heart, an inventive, lively album crackling with energy and ideas and offering fresh angles on familiar sounds. The International Submarine Band approached rock with no presumptions and, more crucially, approached country with no condescension.

That's even more apparent on the new mixes included in this edition, which isolate and emphasize Parsons' vocals. If the original mixes demonstrate his close chemistry with the other players, these new tracks reveal the care and consideration with which he approached country music, whether it's the profound ache in his voice on "I Still Miss Someone" or the desperation he conveys behind the taunts of "Strong Boy." He's not merely singing the songs, but interpreting them: plumbing their depths to see where their sentiments might align with his own experiences. He's writing the rules of country-rock with each word, with each note.

...Parsons' considerable gifts as a songwriter were already evident on tunes like 'Blue Eyes' and 'Luxury Liner'...his passion, understated wit, and deep love for country music are always in the forefront. And while Gram is the star of this show, his bandmates...are solid, soulful, and firmly in the pocket throughout. If Safe at Home sounds like a rough draft for Gram Parsons' later triumphs, it's also a fine record on its own terms, and leaves little doubt that the International Submarine Band's leader had something special right from the start.

These boozy, twangy tracks proved highly influential and laid the foundation for such 1980s outlaw-country acts as Steve Earle and Dwight Yoakam, as well as a generation of alt-country acts, from Uncle Tupelo to First-Aid Kit.