3 out of 5

Label: Monofonus Press / Astral Spirits

Produced by: ?

Our musically flexible performers periodically convened to thrash out their feelings on drums, bass, and sax; Barker Trio’s Avert Your I combines Luttenbacher drums, free jazz sax wailing, and on-speed Don Caballero bass licks into an angsty (and appealing!) mess that might more readily be qualified as hardcore or rock. Songs rarely lasting less than 7 minutes – with a couple stretching to 10+ – also rarely settle, with restless pummeling of the above mentioned instruments and their like, except when the trio makes aggressive silence instead.

The six tracks here are very, very listenable; Andrew Barker, Tim Dahl and Michael Foster have an excellent sense of push and pull and volume, with no one exactly taking the spotlight – so this isn’t a soloing wankfest – and then also juggling chaos and rhythm to just edge this into ‘music’ as opposed to noise.

All the same, there really are (to greatly simplify) only two modes here: loud and quiet. And excepting Outer-Body Image being slightly more chill and “traditionally” jazzy, those ‘modes’ are the defining traits. If pressed, I can say the sax takes lead on the opener, whereas the bass is more driving on followup Ageist, but from afar, the loud songs are pretty similar, and the quiet songs (windy sax playing; muted percussion) are pretty similar, and Enthusiasm Gap’s almost literal mid-point jump between those two modes underlines it even more: instead of drawing some kind of line from one to the other, it’s a hard cut, A to B.

With the tracks shrunk down a bit, I think it becomes more identifiable. But since you can lift most sections of a song and interchange them with another, after a few minutes, even the most awesome riffage starts to become background music. You’ll still find yourself bobbing your head, and idly rocking out, but ‘Avert Your I’ isn’t as directly attention grabbing – at least on record; live is probably a different story – as its bluster may suggest.