And one more, right here.

Also, please listen to Dressed Up For The Letdown, by Richard Swift. the whole album is really really well done.


"BARR: "Context Ender"

Ever talk to someone you dont know? I ended up having an amazing conversation. He wasn't weirded out by having someone he didn't know open up to him on the spot. He just went with it, and it worked.

Listening to BARR can have that effect on you. BARR is the moniker for Brendan Fowler, a musician/performance artist/slam poet/whatever from L.A. Brendan went to high school (and subsequently came on tour ) with members of Animal Collective, and is a regular at The Smell, along with No Age and Xiu Xiu.I don't really know how to review this song. My first instinct is to tell you to go listen to it yourself, because he reviews it within the song, quite literally.

The first 50 seconds of the song are sparse; slow, simple, heavy piano, carefully moving along Brendan's urgent whispering:

i dont even know how to hear it; how to listen
im not even sure what it sounds like i mean
i know it has a sound it sounds like something
im just not sure what
what does it look like

Ok. Self-referential. Where is he going with this? Brendan doesn't sing, but doesn't quite rap. He rants exactly what he thinks, a seemingly raw stream-of-consciousness style that can embarrass the listener. Then the beat comes in. The piano begins to march, incessant and lingering on a single repeated note while the bass echoes the opening piano. The drums add some variety, enough to fill out Brendans voice. As the song continues, its clear that the words are the focus of BARR, hes throwing his mind at you, talking about circumstances and context; how they define you. The beauty of this song may also grate: he packs more philosophical meaning per-second in this track than a conventional musician could, at the cost of subtlety. There is no ambiguity about this song, these words, this message. Sometimes it feels like you are reading an interview with Brendan about existentialism rather than hearing a song, and he knows it. This is why this song is so hard to describe, let alone evaluate. Like he says:

but you only liked it cause you heard it with him
and the speakers sounded perfect
and you were over the other stuff

So, yeah. check it out for yourself."