Barkmarket: Speaking Sardynian

When I first played Barkmarket's L Ron (American), I was arguing viciously with my roommate and trying to keep an ear on the CD as it fought with his voice and New York street noise for my attention. By the second song, our jaws were slack and our eyes were wide, the argument was forgotten, and anything other than the strains seeping out of the speakers seemed as distant as Pluto. "This is one of the greatest things I've ever heard," we said in turn, and even now, after dozens of listens have tempered the initial impact, we haven't wavered in our conviction that L Ron is an ingenious piece of work.

Guitarist/singer Dave Sardy is a producer (Slayer, Helmet), and he thinks like one when he writes. The Brooklyn trio's fourth album is overwhelmingly beat-heavy and dense. They achieve this in part by understanding that the likes of Led Zeppelin (an obvious touchstone for the album) achieved their heaviness and grandeur not through good riffs alone but by crafting the right spaces for the riffs to fill, via dramatic dynamic shifts. The band's songs are dreamlike -- not the ethereal, gauzy kind, but more like the dreams you have in a fitful sleep: disjointed, sweaty, tense. These guys are out there without a life raft. The rudiments of 12-bar blues and verse-chorus-verse structure serve as passing channel markers, but chord progressions and rhythmic patterns are slippery, unpredictable. The songs have slipped anchor, and the parts don't quite flow. In a miracle of sub-lingual communication, the band have invented a language of amplified confusion spoken by them alone. A stunted two-note riff that would be glossolalia to anyone else is for them the building block of an involved musical sonnet.

Of the album's 14 songs, only one ("Undone") is a washout, and even its three and a half sodden minutes are redeemed by a killer refrain at the end. But the first and best song, "The Visible Cow," is the litmus; you'll know right off whether L Ron speaks to you. It's got that Barkmarket pneuma shot all through it, coming on so compellingly bombastic that every other song has to measure up. A cracked, lo-fi acoustic slide guitar collides with Sardy's stream-of-consciousness banter. (Sardy rarely sings, babbling and chanting through most of the songs in a voice that runs the gamut from weary through indignant to demented.) Other, overdubbed electric slide parts clash and drone till he gets off a strident couplet while the slide makes insistent scrapes up the guitar neck. The drums start pounding a backbeat, and just as he moans "Something's moving out there," a "Kashmir"-like orchestral guitar wave bounds up into the foreground, dropping off a second later to let him and the slide get a reprise. The album is full of these sorts of moments of high drama, where dynamic aural extremes get nicely juxtaposed, or where creative production techniques serve as a fourth, ghost bandmember.

In some circles, "prog-rock" is an epithet that'll get you decked, conjuring as it does unbearable pretension and tedium. Barkmarket come as close as anyone I can think of to redeeming the term. Their approach to songcraft is the best manifesto yet scripted on what a band can do with classic rock motions without giving off the stench of retrogression. Perhaps an entire nation of players will be able someday to say "heavy" in Sardynian.

-- Jonathan Dixon