Peger

Like the American band Om, the Israeli pair Barbara is a drums-'n'-bass doom metal duo but there the resemblance ends. The Israeli guys opt for a style of doom metal that, while pretty heavy and droney, includes a lot of percussion improvisation that can fly off on sudden and unexpected tangents, and this results in a music that can be chaotic and everywhere at once. Listening to it is very like listening to a bass-heavy kind of free jazz with technical death metal elements: the drumming is very precise and sharp and can go suddenly fast and then stops just as quickly. (And I take it as a given that many people who visit this website will know of drummers in death metal bands who have a background in jazz drumming techniques.) Of course the bass guitar doesn't necessarily go where the drumming goes and in fact throughout this CD the two instruments are very much playing at odds. This applies to all but one of the 11 tracks on the CD: the one exception to the general rule, the title track "Peger", is a purely acoustic guitar affair.

Most tracks here don't have their own clear identities but are very like chapters in an on-going whirlwind of guitar drone, drum-bashing and distant-sounding vocals. The two members, Ram Hareuveny and David Opp, share singing duties and rant in both English and Hebrew; in practice though, it's difficult to follow what they are singing because the vocals are far back in the mix and the guys gabble quite fast. The more I listen to this album, the more Barbara reminds me of a Japanese duo Ruins who is also just a drums and bass guitar set-up playing a mostly improvised and all-over-the-joint hard rock with nonsense lyrics at breakneck sound-barrier-smashing speeds, and who over a career going back to the early 1990's (I think - I got rather tired of listening to Ruins years ago) has released gazillions of albums over something like several labels (because there's no way one label could take the mountainloads of releases) of very similar sounding music. You hear one Ruins record, you've heard them all. This path is one Barbara would do well to avoid. At least Barbara's lyrics can be taken more seriously than Ruins' lyrics.

The songs in the second half of "Peger" are better than the earlier ones and have more variety and less chaos so listeners can actually hear there is some structure. Some tracks like "Evil Doing" and "Pray to Black" feature an astonishing combination of SLOW bass guitar riffs and lightning-FAST sticks work. "The Feedbacker" in particular has very long and slow guitar drones all the way through combined with hell-for-leather drumming - this is probably the best track on the CD and something Barbara could capitalise more on.

The song "Never Mind The Screaming", featuring Rani Zager, appropriately enough - with him about, the decibel level is sure to rise! - points a way out for Barbara if the guys are to avoid becoming an Israeli version of Ruins: having guest vocalists and musicians to help flesh out the music. Zager's voice though is distant in the mix as well so he sounds as though he's flailing here - I think his singing should have been more upfront. I feel sure he'd agree with me somehow!

This is an album most people will need to play several times over to get used to the harsh music and find melodies and riffs in it but I wonder if they're going to have the patience to sit through something that is mostly unstructured and sounds very contradictory (fast drumming, slow bass guitar). There are good bass riffs in there but they are often buried under the machine-gun drumming or they get swept aside quickly by a change of direction in the music. It'd be no surprise to me if people try listening to "Peger" and end up with completely different opinions to the ones expressed here: they'll be like "the music is a complete mess, how can you listen to this?" If you're already used to hearing improvised music, you will have few problems accepting Barbara on their own terms; other people will find these guys very frustrating and hard to fathom.