So sometimes I feel like Said the Gramophone ought to act as a document, and so if I go with that for a sec I have to admit that basically I've been listening to nothing but this BARR record for the past week.* The song that Dan posted more than a year ago is something I've been returning to for months but finally I went out and got Summary and it's baffling me in the best kind of baffle; making me go wow holy whoa god, huh, he did that.

Because basically it's Arab Strap meets Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, which is to say that they're ripe-hearted soliloquies but instead of talking about his cock, Brendan Fowler sings about art & worry & kindness, candid and cadenced and clear. And these songs depend on listening - you need to hear the words, listen to them, to get it. So I've been discovering the tracks one by one, slow slow slow, digesting just two songs a day or so. Finding new truthfulnesses in each listen.

BARR - "Untitled". Here's a song about loving a friend, but also a song to a friend, an act of love to a friend. A request: come back, come back! You HAVE to make it OUT. And while Fowler is confused about many things he is certain about others, so certain, and you can hear it more than once, here, the clearest earnest things I've heard in a long time.

BARR - "Was I? Are You?". And this is a song about having a friend you "hang out" with, that is to say who you just have sex with, and it's a fug of bass guitar and hands fumbling at cigarette smoke. And it is special not just for the play & real of it, but for the way it shows this music isn't improvised bullshit - it isn't sloppy, it isn't frayed. BARR are precise with their punchlines.

[Buy this record right here, or follow that link to listen to the band's hottt single "The Song Is the Single".]

* There was a break on Sunday afternoon as I walked down the middle of the street - the sidewalks are all foot-high snow - listening to the African choir called ZCC Mukhukhu.

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Basia Bulat did some great radio sessions with Radio K (at the University of Minnesota).

Yeasayer did a Take Away Show with Vincent Moon, Chryde & co, and it's so great, the band in the subway and then even moreso the band in an apartment, too late, making a racket and attracting the neighbours. My favourite part is the end of the second video, a new song called "Tightrope", with four hands on piano and twenty hands on kitchen-tile, and raised voices, and beerbottle clink, and when the video begins swiftly to reverse to beginning, our hearts running backwards to somewhere, somewhere. For those who do not understand French, the text above it says this: Chryde did not much like Yeasayer, and now oh well he does.

[photo is from during Up Helly-Aa, one of the Shetland fire festivals. Photographer unknown.]