The Barr Brothers return with a wonderfully considered and cohesive third album, Queens Of The Breakers.
Before we get into the details, it’s worth pointing out just how well this record hangs together as a whole. It’s loaded with standout tracks, so it’d be easy to miss that, more than anything, it’s a good old fashioned ‘album’ in all its glory. It has a look, feel and sound all its own. Queens Of The Breakers has been crafted from beginning to end.
Throughout there are hints, suggestions and flavours of so many things. Moments that bring to mind everything from Canyon’s Other Shore to 16 Horsepower’s Cinder Alley, or Springsteen’s Nebraska, Fleet Foxes’ Mykonos and even Dixie Chicken-era Little Feat. It’s an astonishing melting pot of ideas all boiled down to their essence. What’s left is a rich, heady mix of harmonies and lyricism.
Boil the record down further, and it becomes even more fascinating, even richer. Opener Defibrillation is breathtakingly beautiful with a soulful kind of Kingsbury Manx-esque rhythm, a little like Springsteen’s Ghost Of Tom Joad only with haunting harmonies replacing the guttural honesty.
Alternately, Song That I Heard has a wonderfully gentle folksiness, slightly trad country but with a little sass hinting at songs like Willy Mason’s Oxygen and Vikesh Kapoor’s The Ballad of Willy Robbins. In fact, there’s almost a Simon & Garfunkel softness and naturalness to its rebelliousness.
This is juxtaposed with a tune like Maybe Someday, which has a brilliant flow that for some reason feels a lot like The Beatles’ Don’t Let Me Down. They’re not the same, but they have a pace, a joyfulness, an exuberance that connects them somewhere. This feeling is also present on You Would Have To Lose Your Mind; although entirely different in tone and tempo to Maybe Someday, there’s a feel of Don’t Let Me Down here too.
The two standout tracks happen to be when the band genuinely shift gear; Kompromat and It Just Came To Me charge a lot harder than the rest of the record and hit hard – probably more so due to the gentle warmth they’re surrounded by. Kompromat is simply fantastic. There’s a kinship between it and Duke Garwood’s Coldblooded, only instead of Garwood’s haunting melancholy you get a song with more purpose, more fire, more intensity.
Its competition for the standout moment, It Came To Me, does the same, only it substitutes intensity for wild abandon. A track brimming with joy, exuding charm throughout, there’s a tangible sense of familiarity. The rhythm has that loose naturalness that so many great songs have. Listening feels like somewhere you’ve been before. With a southern comfort soaked style riff, it has everything from Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Pride and Joy to C.C. Adcock’s Couchemar to The Rolling Stones’ Shake Your Hips.
The whole album feels familiar, everything slots together and everything sounds warm and fuzzy and fulfilling. It’s a heady concoction that all works so well together. Again, Queens Of The Breakers isn’t merely a collection of excellent songs (although it is full of them). Instead, it is a carefully considered and deliberate whole. This is a record that works and is better if listened to from start to finish to truly understand its impact.
And its impact is hard to miss. The Barr Brothers have created a record full of warmth, joy and emotion. An album that feels familiar, and never steps outside of its own world.
A world in which music still has a warm glow, a natural harmony and pleasure.
