The Barr Brothers
Album: Sleeping Operator
Label: Secret City
Tracks: 13
Website: http://www.thebarrbrothers.com

Montreal's The Barr Brothers are (is?) a quite unusual outfit. The quartet consists of the Barr brothers themselves (Brad on guitar and Andrew on drums, who make up the band's songwriting team), together with classically-trained harpist Sarah Pagé and pianist/bassist Andrès Vial. The band sound is at once thrusting and cool, tautly energetic and spacious, and shapeshifts nimbly between airy folk-pop (Love Ain't Enough) and understated steel-driven Americana (Wolves), catchy light-textured acoustica (Even The Darkness Has Arms, which namedrops Tea For The Tillerman along its hypnotic way), ripplesome pulsating mbira-Africana (Little Lover, which brings in a nicely bluesy harmonica part to augment its spiritual flavour) and a sparky delta-blues vibe (Half Crazy), through to sleepy would-be atmospherics (How The Heroine Dies).

The band employ a number of guest musicians to help achieve these bold textural experiences. Compelling and quirky though the overall mix is, however, there's also a strange sense of directionlessness about many of the songs, and the elusive character of the lyrics and sometimes subdued vocal delivery, doesn't always provide the degree of positive input required in order to lift the music further out of the grooves and more firmly into the listener's consciousness. The crooning backdrop to closing track Please Let Me Let It Go is a mite cloying, while even a weirdly dissonant solo from an unidentifiable instrument and some swaggering guitar work towards the track-end can't altogether shift the jazzy complacency of The Bear At The Window.

OK, so we've almost an hour of music here from which to make up our minds, and there's sufficient variety in expression to make this a virtue, but even so it's hard to make each element count quite as intended I suspect, whatever the eventual context. The ostensibly laid-back Come In The Water builds into a more posturing climax, but there's something suspiciously contrived, even derivative, about its gameplan.

Apparently the band wrote 40 songs for the album, from which they chose just a third for recording - and maybe this was one or two too many, for some (like the overly drifty Bring Me Your Love and the melodically less-than-interesting England) do feel rather like excess padding in the company of the more distinguished compositions here (perhaps the quality-control operator was sleeping on the job?). It's not always easy to keep the faith.

David Kidman