Bob Mould, David Barbe

×

Expand

Ryan Bakerink

A close-up of Bob Mould.

Bob Mould

media release: Bob Mould’s 15th solo album, Here We Go Crazy, is a distillation of the unfailing melodic skill, the emotional lucidity and dynamic fluency he’s developed over more than four decades. Its turbulent vignettes are scored by Mould’s familiar bruised tunefulness, but the sound is pared back to its fundamentals, 11 songs blistering past in just over 30 minutes. “I’ve stripped things back to what excited me as a young guitarist,” he explains. “The energy, the electricity.” Mould knows Here We Go Crazy is an album freighted with darkness; “There’s soothing melodies, and there’s lyrical discomfort,” he deadpans.“ It’s manic, frantic, complex.” But no one ever came to Bob Mould for good news, for the easy answers. Pop music runs through his veins, as surely as the electricity that drives his chiming hooks into the realms of distortion, but he’s here to give you the truth, his truth. To give you songs that ring true when howled against a tornado of guitar, that compress all that “lifetime emotional content” into some kind of sonic diamond. There’s eleven of those precious gems here, sculpted to make the heaviness easier to bear, somehow. Treasure them.

David Barbe has been referred to as having the most widespread influence of any single person in the Athens, GA music scene due to his involvement with so many different artists and projects over the years, from his start playing with noise damaged groups like Mercyland, Bar-B-Q Killers, and Buzz Hungry in the 1980s and ‘90’s; to his stint as bassist in Sugar(Bob Mould’s legendary post-Husker Du band), with whom he toured the globe many times and released 3 classic records; to his work as an engineer/producer on hundreds of albums. The artists with whom he has worked include Deerhunter, Drive-By Truckers, The Glands, Son Volt, New Madrid, Bettye LaVette, and Muuy Biien. Many of these were recorded at his Athens based Chase Park Transduction studio.

"10th of Seas" marks a departure for Barbe in that he performed and recorded the entire thing by himself, playing all the instruments, all recorded to analog tape at Chase Park Transduction.

"I wanted this record to be as close to the original source of inspiration as possible," Barbe says. "I tried recording some of the songs with other people involved a few times, and it was better in some ways, but always seemed something was lost in translation. The communication became less personal. I felt like the emotional gravy is the glue, so I reverted to working like I did when I was teenager making 4-tracks. Working fast. More feeling it. Less over-thinking it."

Album highlights include: "Portuguese Door," slippery and melodically complex, and the opening burst of "Dim Bulbs," the lyrics of which contain the album's title. "10th of Seas" is a reference to exploring the outer reaches of one's mind.

Barbe says: "The phrase 'sailing the seven seas' did not mean just crossing the known bodies of water, but to go around the world and back. To sail across the 10th of Seas would indicate traversing through the unknown, to have seen it all, and then some."

Barbe toured America in support of the album backed by Inward Dream Ebb, the alter ego of Athens-based psych-rockers New Madrid, with whom Barbe has produced several albums