Over the past two decades, Barrie Cadogan has cultivated a reputation as your favorite artist’s favorite guitarist. He’s the sort of guy who routinely gets invited to talk gear; his credits list—Paul Weller, Liam Gallagher, Morrissey, Edwyn Collins—reads like the table of contents in a MOJO special edition. At various points, he’s been promoted from session player to proper member: He served nine years in Primal Scream, got recruited by The The (on Johnny Marr’s recommendation, no less), and will spend much of this year touring with the Black Keys as their second guitarist. And the Keys relationship goes beyond a mere gun-for-hire arrangement: Dan Auerbach’s label Easy Eye is also the current North American label for Cadogan’s own combo, Little Barrie, who started up in Nottingham back in 2000 and have largely lurked in the shadows of Cadogan’s more famous affiliates. But not only have Little Barrie endured, they’ve kept getting more adventurous and idiosyncratic, to the point where they’re now making the best music of their career, a quarter century into the game.
On their earlier records, Little Barrie sounded like the sort of band that could ably fill out the third slot on a bill topped by fellow retro-minded, garage-adjacent rock’n’soul acts like the Coral and Zutons, knocking out self-explanatory songs like “Surf Hell” and “Fuzz Bomb.” For a while there, it seemed like history would remember them not for any particular song or album, but a single guitar chord: the twangy teaser that welcomes you into Albuquerque’s desert-noir underworld at the start of each episode of Better Call Saul. Their theme for the celebrated AMC series would get tacked onto 2017’s Death Express, a sprawling, transitional work—envisioned as their garage-band answer to the Beastie Boys’ early-’90s CD-stuffing tapestries—in which bassist Lewis Wharton and drummer Virgil Howe steered the band toward a more exploratory, groove-driven style of psych-funk. Howe’s death that same year threatened to derail their creative momentum, but Cadogan and Wharton would go on to team up with Heliocentrics drummer Malcolm Catto for two excellent jointly billed albums—2020’s Quartermass Seven and 2025’s Electric War—that continued to push Little Barrie into the uncharted territory somewhere between Cream and Can.
Though Gravity Freeze was recorded with the band’s new drummer, Tony Cootes, it retains the weed-hazed nocturnal atmosphere and rhythm-forward, Jaki-jacking approach of their Catto collaborations. Cadogan may have named his group after himself, but that’s where the egoism ends—as a bandleader, he’s a remarkably selfless and strategic player. On the album’s shuffle-grooved opener, “More Bad Miles of Road,” he uses his guitar like a ventriloquist works a dummy, turning his instrument into a campy call-and-response device. When he sings the hard-luck chorus, he punctuates each lyric with a brief six-string squeal that radiates like a pang of chest pain, as Wharton’s descending bassline expedites the narrator’s downward spiral. But there’s no better display of Cadogan’s less-is-more ethos than the album’s seven-minute asphalt-ripping workout “Luggin’ Hurt,” which barrels forward on a rumbling rhythm that belongs in the Choogle Hall of Fame alongside Deep Purple’s “Hush” and ZZ Top’s “Cheap Sunglasses”: Instead of muscling his way in with a spotlight-seizing solo, Cadogan maintains a hovering presence like a foreman supervising a production line, dropping periodic dollops of guitar grease into the cogs to keep the machine rolling smoothly.
While Little Barrie may belong to a long lineage of bluesy power trios, Gravity Freeze presents Cadogan as a basement indie-pop eccentric as much as an axe-slinger. He possesses a disarmingly delicate, vaporous voice that lends even a frantic fuzz spasm like “Coralisa” an uncanny aura and surprisingly tender core, and he’s not averse to feeding his songs through a faded Unknown Mortal Orchestra filter (“Is It Soul”) or the wistful rainy-day jangle of the Clientele (“December”). From Jon Spencer to Jack White to Cadogan’s Black Keys buds, there have been many attempts over the years to resurrect the raw spirit of old school rhythm’n’blues in a modern indie-rock context. But Little Barrie are less interested in bringing the sound back from the dead than inhabiting its ghost, forsaking authenticity for ambiguity and virtuosity for vibe.
