Don’t let their smiling faces on the promotional material fool you. These guys are not the ones you want to play at your birthday party. Your funeral maybe.
That’s if you want chilling poetry about the Holocaust read out over the top of five intense musicians, who have been traumatized by a childhood in Wisconsin and are battling with their daemons on stage, whilst your friends try and remember something nice to say about you to your spouse.
Barbez make music so deep, dark and dangerous that when they speak in a friendly mild mannered way in between songs you can hardly believe it is the same people. They began way back in 1997, and have been a semi-regular fixture on the New York art-rock scene ever since, leaving for tours across the U.S. and to visit us here in sunny Europe. The musician’s backgrounds encompass jazz, classical, and rock with the sounds as diverse as their training suggests.
Their latest album is the musical rendition of the poems of the late Jewish/German poet Paul Celan. The poet, whose parents died in concentration camps, was sent to a forced labor camp during the war and wrote poetry which expresses both deep despair and a love of the German language (he committed suicide in 1970).
The intensity of the music, with the melancholic words drifting in and out of audibility as the band play louder, can be overwhelming at times. At others it can be a little dull, as the band noodle their way towards the end of a song with little in the way of climax or fresh ideas. Maybe you have to be more sophisticated to appreciate the subtle parts than this humble reviewer is, but the bits which worked best were the climaxes, as the band seemed lost in their own (probably slightly twisted) thoughts, letting the passion break through their intellectual musings.
Barbez make music so deep, dark and dangerous that when they speak in a friendly mild mannered way in between songs you can hardly believe it is the same people. They began way back in 1997, and have been a semi-regular fixture on the New York art-rock scene ever since, leaving for tours across the U.S. and to visit us here in sunny Europe. The musician’s backgrounds encompass jazz, classical, and rock with the sounds as diverse as their training suggests.
Their latest album is the musical rendition of the poems of the late Jewish/German poet Paul Celan. The poet, whose parents died in concentration camps, was sent to a forced labor camp during the war and wrote poetry which expresses both deep despair and a love of the German language (he committed suicide in 1970).
The intensity of the music, with the melancholic words drifting in and out of audibility as the band play louder, can be overwhelming at times. At others it can be a little dull, as the band noodle their way towards the end of a song with little in the way of climax or fresh ideas. Maybe you have to be more sophisticated to appreciate the subtle parts than this humble reviewer is, but the bits which worked best were the climaxes, as the band seemed lost in their own (probably slightly twisted) thoughts, letting the passion break through their intellectual musings.
