Barn Owl – V (Thrill Jockey Records)
For a band whose music unfolds as gradually and ponderously as Barn Owl’s, their sonic evolution has occurred at a relatively rapid clip. From the start, they proved themselves one of the better bands who took after the sinister, vaguely spaghetti western-ish sturm und twang dirge that Earth brought into the world with Hex. Albums like Ancestral Star and The Conjurer further extrapolated the approach, largely eschewing all but guitars in favor of expansive desert music.
Barn Owl – V (Thrill Jockey Records)
For a band whose music unfolds as gradually and ponderously as Barn Owl’s, their sonic evolution has occurred at a relatively rapid clip. From the start, they proved themselves one of the better bands who took after the sinister, vaguely spaghetti western-ish sturm und twang dirge that Earth brought into the world with Hex. Albums like Ancestral Star and The Conjurer further extrapolated the approach, largely eschewing all but guitars in favor of expansive desert music. Lost In The Glare was more of a study in contrast that, though very similar in timbre and tone to its predecessors, was characterized by a wider variety of moods, from gentle acoustic folkiness to full-on doom crush (aided in no small part by a lineup augmented with percussion, something the band rarely employed beforehand). Further releases, such as their collaboration with the Infinite Strings Ensemble, focused more on straight drone than any sort of conventional songwriting and, while it was certainly a different tack, this approach was less a sharp deviation from Barn Owl’s larger body of work and more a display of another facet of their sound. So to suggest that V, their newest album, isn’t surprising isn’t to imply that it’s at all disappointing or uninteresting, only that it’s yet another excellent example of the band’s ability to consistently create solid albums, each one providing their sound a slight nudge forward.
The most notable manner in which V differs from previous efforts is that it seems like less of a directly guitar-oriented album. Though the trebly twang of their early work pops up on “The Long Shadow” and “Pacific Isolation,” the emphasis tends to lean more towards textural electronic elements, with layers of atmospheric keyboard washes dominating the songs. From the tense sparseness of opener “Void Redux” to the dense, distorted sound clusters that streak across the surface of “Against The Night,” Barn Owl are able to demonstrate the extent to which they’ve expanded their palette without abandoning their ability to evoke and sustain a mood.
Additionally, while the band had begun to explore percussive elements on previous releases, these are incorporated in a far less conventional fashion in their newest batch of material. Whereas the occasional older song might have some minimal drumming augmenting the heavier passages, the newest has rhythmic components that are far more subdued, possessed of a sinister subtlety that adds to the music’s ominous qualities. These moments don’t occur with any consistency, but when they do they emerge from the dense haze of sound like distant war drums or the sound of an encroaching wild animal crunching through the underbrush, only to disappear as quickly as they emerged, as if hiding themselves until they can be made known again.
Though V often seems like little more than Barn Owl giving slightly more definition to their sonic bedrock, the incremental shifts in their approach aid them exponentially in defining who they are as a band. Once more, they’re able to deftly navigate the treacherous terrain between artistic stasis and an over-reach that places their music beyond the qualities that defined it. By walking this middle course and falling for neither extreme, Barn Owl have again demonstrated that their artistic trajectory is as expansive as the music that they create, a sonic landscape that is as consistently unfolding as it is compelling.
