Verse

There are some stunningly strange moments on the album--the weightless opening of "The Moon", the mournful echoing guitar & tiny shards of a distant string orchestra on "Clues"--as well as some attractive grooves, often in Barber's favourite off-kilter time-signatures (5 and 7). The one dud for me is "The Fire", which seems to me an attempt to work in the territory of short-story writers like Raymond Carver--it's a bit too cliched in its portrayal of a suburban housewife's ennui to work, I think, & the music is nearly static. But the other 9 tracks are often superb, & always take a few risks--the conceits of "I Could Eat Your Words" & "If I Were Blue" could be merely precious (respectively, a students' erotic obsession with her teacher & with philosophy, expressed in culinary conceits; & a dark-toned elegy which draws its comparisons from various artists' characteristic palettes--"David Hockney's pool" "an Edward Hopper afternoon" &c.). But these actually work out well because of the spareness of the settings & because the conceits work to remove the music from a sense of embarrassing or overweening confessionalism. Perhaps Thomas Campion or John Dowland are closer to the mark than ee cummings?

Very much recommended. Like most of Barber's work it'll probably divide people into virulently opposed camps: it was quite instructive to see that in _Downbeat_ they handed this to four critics & ended up, not with consensus, but with two extremely enthusiastic reviews & two bitter pans. I'm on the side of the enthusiasts: how about you?

This is the first disc where Ms. Barber wrote all the music. What that means is that you get precious little melody. Even in her best work: "Touch of Trash", "What a Shame", "Let it Rain", there is not a strong melodic presence. On past albums that have featured her songs, though, this was balanced by her inventive, idiosyncratic adaptations of others' melodies like "Use Me Up", "Ode to Billy Joe", or "You, the Night, and the Music". The steady diet of atonality here is hard to like. You can respect it for its intellectual bite, but it's hard to like it. Even harder to like are the unwelcome excesses of trumpeter Douglas.

Under these circumstances, the "verse" of the title carries a heavy load. Sadly, in my view, it's not consistently up to the task. Mostly, it lacks the concrete, edgy irony and sharp wit of her best work. It seems, at times, almost like earlier, less mature work that she's gotten brave enough to put out. At its worst it degenerates into sophomoric, beat era coffee shop listing. Witness the entire content of "Lost in Love" which consists of 32 lines of "where is this or that" coupled with "I'm lost in this love", or "Clues" with its laundry list of 27 of them like "the edge of the knife", "the black of the night", etc., etc. This from the same pen that wrote: "can't you make those downtown hopping/ grocery shoping/ perky, plodding, cheerful folk/ go away"... "c'mon bring down the sky/ let the clouds and me have a good cry/ let it rain." Hard to believe!

Is it all bad? Absolutely not. Ms. Barber's too talented for that. "Pieces", despite losing it way at the very end, is quite good; as is, generally, "I Could Eat Your Words". Better yet is "If I Were Blue" which is just Pat and guitarist Neal Alger (a bright spot throughout) with its painterly references, spanish sounding guitar, and gentle (for Barber) poignancy. But the star of this disc is the delightfully smash mouth "You Gotta Go Home". It's the most concrete, direct, ironic, and witty song of the group and features the beautifully layered drums of Eric Montzka (sadly, absent otherwise) and the ever present drive of Arnopol's bass. Dynamite!

But those few are not enough, for me, to redeem the whole. After a string of successes for Pat and her band(s), I rate this one as a reverse. Borrow somebody else's copy before you buy it.