2 out of 5

Label: Hydra Head

Producer: Andrew Schneider

I wish I had some reference points to Barbaro, but I can’t trace them too far beyond Andrew Schneider’s appearances in the Boston scene, which I guess accounts for how they scored a Hydra Head 7″.  Schneider was apparently in a bamillion bands, but I suppose more notably produced a bamillion bands, leaving Barbaro as a footnote in his many-hatted career.  Perhaps appropriately so?  I’d have to hear a full album to say what’s what, but the two tracks here only vary from generic screamy rock a tad, and only one side of the single even does that.  The A-Side, Feeding, has a nice metallic guitar noise and funky bass line, but whoever’s singing (Schneider?) has, unfortunately, a really generic heavy rock shriek that coats over whatever they’re doing musically to make it sound like any other radio band from the early 2000s.  Whoops.  The B-side is a bit better as the vocals are scaled back a bit to work with that same funky low-end / harsh high-end thing.  It sounds like a chick speaky/yelly, but who knows.  Out of the two songs, “Two Boozlers” makes me a return for a second spin, but there’re still not too many layers to shed beyond it being a rock song.

The clear vinyl with no label is fun, the song names (‘Feeding’ called ‘Seeding’ on the vinyl) etched into the run-out groove, and the packaging is, as is almost always the case with Hydra Head, appealingly unique, even for a 7″ single.  But with music, we can’t really rate things on their cover, eh?