I usually use a song title from an album I'm reviewing in the post's title. And while I'm using "Fake Nostalgia", there's nothing fake or nostalgic about anything on the starkly realized new album from Katie Alice Greer. Simultaneously minimalist and chock full of meaning, the debut solo full-length from the former singer of Priests is stunning. While not punk in style, Barbarism is punk in spirit.
Following on from earlier offerings "Captivated" and the roaring "FITS/My Love Can't Be", the selections here on Barbarism continue to explore Katie's dissection of being. "Fake Nostalgia" finds Greer cooing over a bed of clattering samples and supple keyboard lines. Her voice might be soothing, but the lyrics, about the pernicious "Fake Nostalgia" are potent. The personal and political here are one and the same, even as "Dreamt I Talk to Horses" conjures up worry and paranoia. Lots here does, really, which I think is sort of the point. Katie Alice Greer is too smart an artist to simply use her vocal chops to please, and that's why she deserves the acclaim and praise she got with Priests, and should get here with Barbarism.
Rather than embrace a kind of irony, or appropriation of past forms to make points, Katie Alice Greer, in doing everything here on this record, retains control as the uneasy vision she's seen is pursued. This is a very current record in terms of mood, one suited to that feeling where it feels like the world is falling apart, and the apparatus of the state is hastening its demise. "Barbarism", the title cut that closes the record of the same name, works up to a faintly fever pitch, the pieces, and Katie's voice, swirling around a listener like the things seen from Dorothy's window as the tornado carried that house to Oz. Some might feel that it was good for Dorothy to get her world upended and her ass hauled off to a land with flying monkeys, even if it took a lonely witch to do it. Things were never that perfect ("Fake Nostalgia", indeed) and there was always barbarism in the everyday. It only takes someone to pull the curtain back to reveal it.
Barbarism is out tomorrow via FourFour Records, with details below.
[Photo Credit: Kathryn Vetter Miller]