The MP3s is available via SXSW, one of the hundreds of new free and legal MP3s recently posted there for the 2007 festival. “Hard Line” comes from Barber’s second CD For All Time, which was released last year in Canada on Outside Music. And I keep listening, keep trying to sink fully into this indescribably rich and playful and sweet and knowing voice, even while bobbing my head and tapping my toe to a song that acquires a deep and meaningful momentum underneath the peppiness as it unfolds. So I wouldn’t trade the snappy vibe here for anything. And yet, of course, the paradox is one needs the form to give rise to the essence. In a way, the snappy vibe is almost a distraction–I get caught up bobbing my head and tapping my toe and I don’t really listen, much the way one gets caught up in daily living and forget, for days on end, simply, to be. Just a quarter step away from a twang, Barber may sound somewhat like Nanci Griffith, and maybe also somewhat like one of the McGarrigle sisters, or both of them, but the Halifax, Nova Scotia-based singer/songwriter is truly her own singular self. “Hard Line” – Jill BarberĪnything this sharp and snappy is pleasant enough to listen to from the get-go, but for me what renders it memorable is Barber’s voice. The MP3 is available via Spinner, the AOL Indie Music Blog. “23” is the title track to Blonde Redhead’s forthcoming CD, the band’s seventh, scheduled for release in April on 4AD Records. Blonde Redhead is an intriguing, international, NYC-based trio–Makino’s from Japan her bandmates are twin brothers Simone and Amedeo Pace, from Italy. Another unexplained coincidence?) I invite you to go back and listen to the entire song and try only to hear the guitar rather than the singer. (Ah, note how the song is introduced by a few keyboard chords. And let me get more specific about the guitar noise, because it’s a particular kind, the kind where the chords just seem to melt or bend continually into one another the guitar is played (via a pedal of some kind?) more like a keyboard, with a sustained tone rather than in discrete strums of any kind. Kazu Makino may as well be singing in Serbo-Croatian for all I can understand her the only thing I’m picking up is that she’s actually saying “two-three” rather than “twenty-three” (so, no, no tie-in to the Jim Carrey movie just an unexplained coincidence! bwa-ha-ha!). I’m a sucker for the combination of guitar noise and melody, particularly when the melody comes, as here, via a breathy, difficult to decipher soprano. A ravishing combination of guitar noise and melody.
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