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Barn Burning are a three-piece from Providence. Their music is kind of gentle, resolutely mid-tempo, kind of folk-rocky. It's warm, soft music; as it's been a cold, hard day, I don't much mind this. The guitar could be louder, but when I can hear it it's mostly very pleasant, with an occasional surprising streak of bitterness in the chords that helps keep it from getting bland. So too do the bassist's occasional forays into piano and vocal harmony, and a song with an elegant waltz rhythm. The guitarist breaks a string early on, manages one more song on five strings, and then switches to acoustic for the rest of their set.
I've heard a lot of good things about Akron/Family. (And also that they did a project with Angels of Light, with whom my one experience was not positive, but I'm certainly not going to hold that against them.) They are a four-piece with a whole lot of different instruments and other sound-producing devices onstage. They start out holding stuffed birds (that chirp when you squeeze them) up to the microphones. Gradually, they shift to two guitars, bass, and drums, but it's a very spacey/disorganized soundscape of a piece. Occasionally the drummer will begin to fall into a rhythm and the whole thing threatens to jell into a song; whenever this happens, they more or less immediately do something different. There is a short section where all four of them sing, and there's some lovely, classic rock-flavored harmony, but it's just a fragment of a verse and then on to something else. This piece ends rather suddenly, and they immediately start playing a thrashy intro before devolving into jam-band noodling.
They are Quirky.
As the set progresses, they play xylophone and melodica, kazoos and tambourines, recorders and little bells and miscellaneous hand percussion. Very rarely do they play anything much like a song, and one of those is a cover. There are drone sections that get interesting in their exploration of texture and stasis, then go on much longer than I can sustain any interest in them. There are long, noodling solos. There are Quirky Antics. At one point, both guitarists gather around the drum set, pick up sticks, and start drumming. This is enormously promising, but with three people drumming they never branch out beyond a very simple four-beat. Then the drummer and one guitarist wander off the stage and play from the back of the audience, playing a tambourine and a (mercifully inaudible) banjo, respectively, out of tempo with the guitarist who is still hitting the drums. They end this one by gathering at the back of the room for a four-part sing-along on mushily religious themes that repeats one verse for quite a while. Many of these four-part singing sections have really lovely harmony, although some of them suffer from vocal pitch issues that occasionally get serious. They're certainly putting on a show, and much of the audience seems really into it. But for me, all this clowning around doesn't make up for songwriting that leaves me cold. There's a fair amound of talent, little structure, and no momentum, and I just find myself getting bored a lot. I've never really been into jam bands, though, so if you like Phish, maybe you'd like Akron/Family.
