Barbarisms – West in the Head
Human Music Group – 20 July 2018
On their third album, Stockholm-based trio Barbarisms, fronted by American Nicholas Faraone, are inspired by themes of destinations. The title, West in the Head, comes from an essay by William H Gass in which he paraphrases Gertrude Stein’s reading of American Expansionism and the migration of American Modernists to Paris.
If the press release’s description of one track as a ‘political-dadaist romp’ suggests you might need a degree in cultural philosophy to get a grip on the album, fear not; sung in an engaging nasal tone and sporting melodic hooks and frills, the album evokes the sunny tones of 70s singer-songwriter even as the lyrics sometimes mine chillier climes.
It opens with the synth-pop pulse and sax colours of Bone Beach singing about being “the only gravedigger on an island of solid rock” and how if you don’t get “a little dirt on the dead, how are you going to make them stop talking?” – apparently, a number about serving the memory of departed loved ones.
On My Take, its lazing narcotic guitar groove and Faraone’s semi-spoken delivery of lines like “I’m tired of taking off my clothes just to get dirty again” makes it hard not to think of the Velvets while the strummingly enigmatic indie folk Moaning Teresa (“are we any closer knowing what we know now”), where “men in the streets are blowing their brains out”, conjures Jonathan Richman. That same alt-country slacker vibe is equally evident on the indolent half-speed Waiting For My Man chug of Freewheeling Through the Old World, the aforementioned stomp penned during the 2016 Presidential election, and album closer Common Tongue, a song built upon a repeated circular guitar pattern and martial beat, recalling playing poker with a childhood friend and how the stakes changed as they grew older and apart.
First Try is another dreamily druggy sway somewhere between Reed and Stipe, while late-night sax runs its fingers through the lyrically playful Focus Group where the devil’s in the over scrutinised details. Public Places is a more uptempo hand-clapping skitter about living in plain sight and how sometimes the words don’t work, but it’s the following two tracks that are the album’s golden moments. First up is the gorgeous chugging, lyrically barbed, melodically tumbling Royal Ballet Academy that put me in mind of a pop-folk cross between balladeering Creedence and The Triffids written by Jarvis Cocker. Then comes the minor key romantic anthem Soulful Lingo, a song about reaching a point where you’re forced to confront yourself with all illusions stripped away as Faraone sings “I had never been that broke before, I never knew what was mine, until I had to turn on everybody.”
While the songs are described as brutal in emotional suggestion, it’s Faraone’s disarming confessional tones and the overall, cumulative lo-fi and often shimmering folk beauty that draws you in and keeps you in its arms.