The best part about playing in Los Angeles, Brad Barr told the packed room at the Satellite on Friday night, is putting Samuel Jackson on the guest list and hoping he shows up. From what I could tell, Mr. Jackson did not take advantage of this honor, but the band provided enough star power to go around – these guys are hot.
For their final show of 2014, The Barr Brothers closed out their U.S. Sleeping Operator tour at a divey nondescript club tucked away in a mostly residential section of Silver Lake. The Satellite is the kind of place that might have been hard to find back in the dark days before the Google, back when it was known as Spaceland, an integral part of the music scene that nursed careers of Beck and Elliott Smith, among others. It’s still a popular destination for up-and-coming indie acts, and while it may be hard to believe the Barrs, who are in their third decade of making music together, are “up-and-coming,” in the distribution of rewards they may yet get their due.
I first became aware of these guys in the mid-nineties while attending art school in Providence where brothers Brad and Andrew (and bassist Marc Friedman) performed as jazz-influenced jam-rock trio The Slip. “That band from Conan,” as they sometimes called themselves, The Slip developed over ten years or so an eclectic catalogue of songs, some of which were placed in Grey’s Anatomy and Guitar Hero, which like the Conan O’Brien appearance, helped edge them into the national spotlight.
Then about seven years ago when The Slip made a stop in Baltimore, I heard Brad tell an anecdote about a new tune they were working on called Sarah through the Wall, which evidently owed its inception to an apartment in Montreal that shared an adjoining wall with classically trained harpist, Sarah Page, whose “strange overtones” had inadvertently started to influence his writing. Sarah through the Wall eventually made it onto The Barr Brothers 2011 debut album, and former neighbor Sarah became an essential member of the new band.
The coincidences and connections that spark musical collaboration often come about in mysterious ways, and the Brothers’ latest collaboration is flourishing. Sarah Page’s harp adds sophistication and depth to some really nice melodies and tasteful arrangements in songs that explore liminal spaces between waking world and dreamland. The October release, Sleeping Operator, is one of those albums so rich and textured that you wonder how effective the band will be at recreating it live – but this five-piece touring ensemble of multi-instrumentalists did not disappoint.
Though billed as a folk quartet, The Barr Brothers have more to offer audiences than traditional tragic stories and acoustic instrumentation. Their sonic palette ranges from dirty rocking blues to lush power ballads, and the writing is more sophisticated than that of your average folk band. Touring as a quintet (with the addition of pedal steel) the live band displays as much musical wizardry, if not as much extended jamming, as The Slip.
A soft-spoken front man, Brad is the kind of guitar player other guitar players like to study – because it’s usually not very easy to figure out what he’s doing up there. At times he appears to be flossing his guitar strings to create some eerie atmospherics, while other times he uses a handheld portable amplifier to generate feedback. Meanwhile, his brother Andrew strums a banjo or taps out percussion lines on the spokes of a bicycle wheel, and pedal steel player, Joe Grass, stands to saw away at an acoustic guitar with a violin bow. The result of all this instrumental exploration is actually very cohesive and reserved, and the melodies they produce are contagious.
They opened the night with “Little Lover”, a West African-influenced folk tune with vocal harmonies, then followed up with “Even the Darkness Has Arms”, which as one of NPR’s “Most Played Songs of 2014” features a thumping bass line that affects a Graceland-like groove. The moodiness of “Wolves” held the room entranced under the spinning lights of the house disco ball for a good five minutes, then the bluesy “Half Crazy” kicked the show into high gear with some extended jamming that carried us out of the folk genre and into Come in the Water, which with its retro groove (complete with oohs, ahs and na-nas) sounds like the best of soulful mid-seventies rock – so it was kind of appropriate that their next song, “Old Mythologies” included a tongue-in-cheek (and mercifully brief) reference to the 1976 Bob Seger hit, “Night Moves”.
“How the Heroin Dies” has the quiet dignity that good ballads should have, and this one might have been written by Roger Waters or Tom Waits if these guys hadn’t dreamed it up first. “Static Orphans”, which sounds like an adventure movie soundtrack from the nineties, led as it does on the album into “Love Ain’t Enough”, which could have been a Slip track with its monster hooky chorus and jamming opportunities. “Beggar in the Morning” brought us back into folk territory before we were treated to a round of drums by Andrew.
“Deacon’s Son”, one of a handful they played from their debut album, is another that dips into the West African flavor, and this rendition brought Sarah Page to the forefront with a decidedly badass Harp solo. “Bear at the Window” made for a huge closer with its extended Lennonesque “feel no pain” refrain. After bringing back supporting act Leif Vollebekk for the acoustic part of the encore, the five piece band brought down the house with a cover of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Lord, I Just Can’t Keep from Crying Sometimes”.
This West Coast leg concludes a national tour that included an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman during which the soon-to-retire host gushed over the album and announced he would like his next job to be as their new manager (I think Paul wanted to get in on that, too). Since this is their last show on the West Coast for a while, fans will have to be content playing Sleeping Operator again and again as I did in the month leading up to Friday night. Maybe by the time they return, Sam Jackson will make it out to the show, but then again, they’re bad enough mofos without him.
For now, the brothers are off to a well-earned vacation south of the border, but the band will be back in New York for one show in January before heading to the UK and Canada in 2015. In the meantime, just listen to the album on vinyl, and you will feel no pain.
