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Friday Full-Length: Barr, Skogsbo is the Place

Posted in Bootleg Theater on April 9th, 2021 by JJ Koczan

The first thing you hear — and it’s quick, but it’s there — is birdsong. Swedish mushroom folk serenity-bringers Barr released their debut album, Skogsbo is the Place (discussed here), in 2008 through the Transubstans Records-affiliated imprint Sakuntala. MySpace era. I bought it, as you can read in that link, after sampling an MP3 from the now-gone All That’s Heavy webstore, and digging further into the entire affair thereafter. It has proven almost infinitely listenable — the kind of record that calls you back over time, or even just pops into your head somewhere along the line while you’re listening to something else; a source of sonic coincidence. That’s what happened this week and prompted the revisit, but for all the time I’ve spent hearing it, I’m not sure I ever bothered to look up what or where Skogsbo is until now.

I’ve listened to enough Scandinavian metal to know “skog” is “forest” in English, and that makes sense with the cover art of Skogsbo is the Place, and in the east of Sweden, there are a bunch of places with the designation. Bus stops, little spots. A nature preserve south of Gothenburg that would be a pretty good candidate, but the band were based in Stockholm and Finspång, so who knows. “Skogsbo,” the word, translates to “forest estate,” so fair enough. I guess it could just be a cottage in the woods belonging to someone in the band — vocalist Andreas Söderström (also harmonium, glockenspiel, dulcimer), vocalist/guitarist Patrik Andersson, vocalist/flutist Hanna Fritzson, vocalist/guitarist Marcus Palm, bassist/cellist Svante Söderqvist, pianist Patric Thorman, percussionist Fredrik Ohlsson — or it could just as easily be a made-up place that doesn’t really exist. It doesn’t make the record any less transporting either way.

“Summerwind” is the opener that gets underway with that birdsong noted above, and that’s not the last nature-sound throughout. The folkish impression is immediate with harmonium and acoustic guitars backing soulful, sweetly melodic vocals, and that presence of arrangement, who’s singing or who’s playing what at any given moment, will change from song to song — Fritzson taking lead vocals on centerpiece “Calling My Name” and the title-track that follows, or or the meandering duet vocals over piano barr skogsbo is the placeof “Words Would Do,” others intertwining at various points between “Summerwind,” “Words Would Do” and “He Ain’t a Friend, He’s a Brother.” Those three serve as the immersive lead salvo that marks one’s passage into these woods, lines like, “I watch the sunrise/It soothes me,” and “Far, far away” and “Let everyone surround you” standing out over arrangements likewise lush, be it the cello sneaking into the end of “Summerwind” and “He Ain’t a Friend, He’s a Brother,” flute amid the harmonies of “Calling My Name,” the subtle snare shuffle on the penultimate “Moonfall” or the return of cello on “Sister,” the closing track which builds in its finish and pulls itself apart leading to captured forest-at-night audio — there’s a cough and some speech as well — before “Lovers Alone” ends the proceedings as a semi-secret track, no less gorgeous for being tucked away as it is.

One wouldn’t call Skogsbo is the Place long at 43 minutes, in no small part because its songs are so wonderfully engaging, but they’re not necessarily short in the way one finds a lot of neo-folk operating. “Words Would Do” at four and a half minutes and the lyric-less title-track at three minutes are the two shortest cuts (“Lovers Alone” might actually be shorter, but it’s somewhere around three minutes as well), and everything else tops six. “Moonfall” stretches to 6:53 and uses its time well to build into a melodic payoff that’s still more about the journey than the destination, and certainly “Summerwind” and “He Ain’t a Friend, He’s a Brother” and “Calling My Name” and “Sister” prove memorable enough with their understated hooks and classic feel that while I can’t really say anything that at any point involves a glockenspiel isn’t indulgent on some level, it’s an indulgence well worth making. Like precious few albums I’ve encountered since, Skogsbo is the Place has the ability to carry the listener along its course, and with particular attention paid to atmosphere and the overarching organic presentation, there’s no regrets in going where it goes.

It was one of the first records I wrote about for this site that wasn’t outwardly heavy but carried a presence of tone and melody and/or an emotional heft to coincide with its abidingly natural psychedelia. It’s not acid folk in the sense of being coated in reverb or blissed out on effects or any of that kind of thing. I think there’s electric guitar on there, but it’s surrounded by acoustics, 12-string, and the diversity of the vocal arrangements to the point that it’s clearly not intended to be a primary factor. Some of the songs sound like the strum came first, others the vocals, others other things. That spirit of song-happening-to-artist is rampant throughout, and the more I hear Skogsbo is the Place, the more it feels like an album I’ll continue to come back to, like visiting an old friend, or a brother. Time changes your context of appreciation, but some records continue to speak to the person you’ve become as well as the person you were. 13 years isn’t eternity, but when I think of the amount of music I’ve come across in that time, Barr‘s debut feels all the more special.

The band’s 2012 follow-up, Atlantic Ocean Blues (discussed here), gave up some of the intimacy of the first offering in favor of breadth, marked in particular by the fuller, jammier take on “He Ain’t a Friend, He’s a Brother” that made its way onto the release. To be perfectly honest with you, I keep that album on my phone in case of emergencies, so I’m not going to say a bad word about it or the resonance it shares with its predecessor. To the best of my knowledge, Barr haven’t done anything since, and whether theirs was a two-album course or if they ever do anything else, I consider myself fortunate to have this music in my life.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

I woke up this morning before four. I haven’t slept well all week, that helps nothing. Yesterday was a turnaround point though. The morning was wretched. We’ve been trying to push on potty training with The Pecan, and just… no. He’s flat-out refused it, and it’s made the house a miserable place and me miserable and stressed and I finally yesterday decided fuck it. I took a xanax in the morning and by the time I put him upstairs for a rest — he doesn’t nap anymore, but goes upstairs for an hour or 90 minutes or however long in the afternoon, and just kind of chills out with himself, plays, whatever; it’s a pattern that benefits everybody; Daniel Tiger has a whole song about a quiet rest being good for you — did some vocals for nascent-heavy-industrial-project, worked on more posts for today and by the time that was done, I’d decided that’s it. I don’t care anymore.

I don’t care when he pisses in the toilet. I don’t care when it happens. Means nothing in the grand scheme of his life. I’ll change his fucking diapers for as long as it takes. I don’t care anymore. It’s not worth the struggle or the stress, or him losing his mind or holding in poop for two days because he feels bad about going in his diaper but is terrified of the potty. I just can’t do it anymore. I don’t care that much. I’m sorry. There’s part of me that feels like I should rip off his diaper, refuse to put another one on, push him out of the nest, and so on, but seriously, fuck it. Maybe I’ll give don’t-be-a-prick a shot and see how that goes.

Yesterday afternoon? Much better. I felt like I’d pushed a weight off my shoulder and because I wasn’t miserable, he wasn’t either. We played and read books and he pissed in his diaper and it was fine. The day proceeded. We had dinner.

He’s been off from school all week. Spring break. We’ve had some real hang-out time. I’ve been spoiled sleeping mornings by him going to school, and there continues to be a big difference in my head between getting up at 5AM or before (I beat the alarm a couple days this week, including today) and getting up at 6AM or even later. Maybe I’ll nap later if I can.

I can’t. I have an interview this afternoon that I rescheduled from yesterday because I was such a mess and then kind of zoned out on meds.

I have more writing to do. Another news post I’d like to have go up today — that’ll be six posts; always gotta pack stuff in on Friday, I guess — and then the second of my two interviews for the Roadburn ‘zine. I put together the Steve Von Till piece yesterday or the day before. Wednesday, it was. The Patient Mrs. took The Pecan out of the house so I could get some time, I wound up transcribing that and Tau both. Still need to write up Tau. That was a cool chat. Seems like a nice guy. Steve Von Till I hadn’t talked to in a long while, so that was interesting as well. He’s kind to put up with my stupid fucking questions about process.

Hey, I like process.

The birds are out and yelling at the sun to rise, so The Pecan will be up soon. It’s almost six. I’m gonna try and get that other post done before it’s breakfast time and then, I don’t know, finish my coffee? That’d be cool. I can’t seem to sit still these days.

Am I the only one super-anxious about shows coming back? Not because of the plague, but because of the shows themselves? I’m not worried about wearing a mask or social distancing, but I’m not sure I ever want to leave the house again either. I miss live music, but there’s so much other bullshit about shows I don’t miss. People, most venues, taking pictures, the work of writing up a live review and knowing that no one’s going to care about it, driving there, driving back, losing basically two days because I was out so late, the pre-show anxiety, the post-show fatigue.

It feels like so much, like the prospect of having that in my life again is overwhelming. I wasn’t dude-at-three-shows-a-week anymore anyway — I did my fucking time — but still. The thought of being out and around. It’s troubling in a way I didn’t anticipate when the world went into lockdown last year and concerts evaporated.

If you have any thoughts, I’d appreciate. On that happy note, thank you for reading. Have a great and safe weekend. Don’t forget to hydrate — so important — and watch your head. New merch up next week, I think.

FRM.

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audiObelisk: Barr’s Redux of “He ain’t a Friend, He’s a Brother” Streaming Now

Posted in audiObelisk on April 19th, 2012 by JJ Koczan

If you didn’t get to hear Barr‘s 2008 debut LP, Skogsbo is the Place, it was one of that year’s subdued highlights (general appreciation here), full of beautiful and sweetly melancholic acid folk, driven by a less postured than “neo-pagan” worship of nature and all things organic, but still mostly about the songs themselves and what melodies and harmonies can accomplish in a setting thoroughly human. The sophomore outing, Atlantic Ocean Blues, arrives next week (04/25) courtesy of Sakuntala Records, an imprint of Transubstans.

Recorded in the band’s native Sweden, Atlantic Ocean Blues is no less pastoral than was its predecessor. Rather, the six-piece band adds more to the psychedelic aspects of their sound, so that opener “The End of the Road” and closer “Hanoi Haze” envelop the traditional songwriting between them in an early-’70s sepia of bright hopefulness. Among the most curious of the album’s tracks is “He ain’t a Friend, He’s a Brother,” which it just so happens was also included on Skogsbo is the Place.

And really, the reason I asked to be able to stream “He ain’t a Friend, He’s a Brother” over any of the other tracks on Atlantic Ocean Blues is because, for anyone who heard the first record, it makes for a firm summary of the changes in sound from that LP to this one. That said, even if you didn’t hear Barr‘s debut, the song has an appeal outside of the curiosity of its being a remake, and that lies in its gorgeous melody and lushness of feel.

Whether or not you’ve heard it before, I certainly hope you enjoy the track in its new form on the player below:

Here is the Music Player. You need to installl flash player to show this cool thing!

Barr‘s Atlantic Ocean Blues will be available on Sakuntala starting April 25, 2012. For more info or to pre-order the album, click here. Patrik Andersson (guitar/vocals) sent along the following input on remaking the song:

The idea behind bringing along “He Ain’t A Friend…” is that we reworked it when we started trying out the new sound in the rehearsal space. We listened to all of these Senegalese and Nigerian psych compilations from the ’70s and tons of Tinariwen and wanted to aim for a more primitive rock sound, like a nomad-blues kind of sound, and as soon as I started playing the originally rather complex guitar figure in that song — you know, it’s played on an oddly-tuned six-string acoustic — with only two tones — we where there. We got into the most effective groove and felt that it was simply was too good not to be recorded for the next album. We also wanted to feature an Arabic-style psych solo with tons of space echo in order to bring the listener further out in the desert moonlight, and worked on that one for many days. Personally, the song is very dear to me, since the lyric’s about a family member gone haywire. So it all made sense. Hope you dig it!

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General Appreciation: Hitting the Barr

Posted in Whathaveyou on March 12th, 2009 by JJ Koczan

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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