Some bands, intentionally or not, overwhelm the reviewer with talking points; one unfortunate side effect of this is that all their reviews sound the same. Allow me to illustrate: nobody has ever written 10 words about Franz Ferdinand without five of them being "archduke," "assassination", and "First World War." Consider, then, Brooklyn's Barbez, a mainstay of the John Zorn-impacted downtown NYC scene and recent signees to Important Records: (1) Their frontwoman is a Russian avant-garde dancer, (2) They have a theremin, (3) The theremin is not used for whooshy space sounds but actually played by a cigarette-smoking waif virtuoso who makes it sound like an entire string section, (4) They cover Kurt Weill, (5) and Schnittke, (6) They lug around a monstrous marimba, and (7) A band member coaxes scratches and squiggles out of a Palm Pilot via a proprietary piece of software. As you may imagine, every attempt at describing Barbez devolves into ritual recitation of these factoids in random order, and before you know it, your allotted 500 words are over.
So let's talk about the music, then. The songs oscillate from tra-la-la chanson to brief explosions of terrifying skronk, hitting everything in between. Although sometimes flamboyant with mid-song tempo and time signature changes, Barbez don't come across as mathy: they're going for controlled chaos, not athletics. The impression is that of a century's worth of vinyl disintegrating in a cellar-- Satie melting into The Stooges-- then somehow willing itself back together. "The Defiant Bicycle", the centerpiece of the album and most of their live performances, is a gorgeous suite that takes so much time to build that the listener's masochistic response (per Masoch's definition of masochism, as delayed pleasure) almost becomes a counterpoint. "Wisconsin"-- songwriter and bandleader Dan Kaufman's ode to his surprisingly prosaic birthplace-- is the closest Barbez come to a traditional lied (via the Residents, perhaps).
The band's self-titled debut on Important is, in fact, their third album (before employing the blonde tornado named Ksenia Vidyaykina, they were fronted by a man with an uncanny Nick Cave bellow, which made the Weimar fetish come through stronger but shaved off some originality points). They've been playing some of the album's songs since 1999; as a result, there's a honed, easy dexterity to the entire performance. Producer Martin Bisi, who's made his name recording Swans and early Sonic Youth, appears less to have produced the album than to have captured it; it's recorded and mixed like a jazz LP-- grounded in a well-defined, specific room, without dramatic panning and loads of what sounds like natural basement reverb.
All theremin-and-Weill trivia aside, what's rather intriguing about Barbez is that a band like this would never come out of the Parisian neighborhood from which its name derives; it also couldn't have possibly emerged from any of the countries whose music and perceived ambience it references/absorbs/bites-- namely Russia, Hungary, or Poland. The sound of Barbez is driven by a distinctly American strain of Europhilia. In a cultural moment when thinking East Coasters are swept up in a bizarre cross-Atlantic camaraderie, borne of the shared November 3rd funk (one entry on sorryeverybody.com: "Apologies from Isle of New York, off the coast of Europe"), Barbez provide a pitch-perfect soundtrack to the intelligentsia identity crisis.
