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General Appreciation: Hitting the Barr

Four dudes looking in different directions. Yup, that's a band photo alright.Back in November sometime, I found the All That is Heavy webstore of StonerRock.com was selling Barr‘s Skogsbo is the Place, and knowing nothing about the band (I’d later come to find out they opened a European tour for Iron and Wine, but that did little to endear them to me), but digging the gray-on-white album art and the item description that included the words “melancholic exploration of pastoral acoustic landscapes,” figured I had nothing to lose in checking out the mp3 of opener “Summer Wind.”

After downloading that song and spending the next month playing it over and over and over again and constantly meaning to buy the record but always getting sidetracked by other purchases and/or the tanking economy, I finally got drunk one December night and, at three in the morning, liquored up and by myself, I downloaded the entirety of Skogsbo is the Place from a Blogspot site I can’t even remember the name of and kept myself awake with it until the sun started coming up and I fell asleep on the couch.

I finally put in my purchase order after a couple days of feeling rightfully guilty, and when the digipak arrived, I immediately put the album on and it has rarely left my side since. With all this stoner rock and doom and all these loud riffs and songs about speeding cars, piloting dunes and the end of the world, Barr‘s nature-reverent neo-folk is an ideal change of pace and palate cleanser. No, it’s not exactly stoner rock, but the soothing Neil Youngisms of “Calling My Name” — which you can hear on the band’s MySpace page — make me want to be much warmer than the valley in March will allow, and that’s not a bad thing.

So consider this a “You should check out this band” recommendation from one friend to another, and if you don’t dig it, well, it’s not like clicking a MySpace link costs money, so you’re not out anything. It’s Swedish, if that helps sell the quality.

Sasquatch buys a hat.

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