Goodnight
Unknown
Merge
By Scott Roberts
Don’t let the urgency of “Sharing,”
the opening cut on Lou Barlow’s new solo CD Goodnight
Unknown, fool you. This track’s incessant beat, provided by The Melvins’ drummer
Dale Crover, and Barlow’s washed-out and tension-filled vocals may lead you to
believe that you, my naïve listener,
are about to rock for the next 40 minutes or so. Even the second song, the
title track, with its grunged-out strumming, may lead you to believe this as
well. Wrong. Instead, Barlow tips his hand on the third song, the stunningly
beautiful “Too Much Freedom,” revealing that what we’re in for is a quiet, intimate work –
his first solo CD since 2005’s mostly acoustic Emoh, that is both intensely personal and quintessentially lo-fi
Lou.
Featuring subtle chiming bells, soaring harmonies at the end (“No heart
beats stronger/no love lasts longer”), and a chugging rhythm that puts the song
in a category best described by the word
“ditty,” the aforementioned “Too Much Freedom” would be at home on a Yusuf
Islam (the former Cat Stevens) CD, despite its staunchly demo-like sound. The
beauty continues on the next track, the quiet waltz “Faith in Your Heartbeat,”
featuring a positively liquid-sounding and all too brief 12-string guitar solo,
and an ending so abrupt that it sounds as if Barlow ran out of tape. The next
song “The One I Call” opens with the line “I didn’t know flowers bloomed on
their own” and goes on to confide “You’re the only one I fall apart for” over a
sweetly picked acoustic guitar that, once again, seems to end sooner than it
should.
Somehow, confessional lyrics such as these, or “Take apart a rainbow/feed it to the sunrise” from
“Take Advantage,” don’t come off as cloying coming from Barlow, perhaps because
of the more muscular work he is known for in Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh, or The Folk
Implosion. Occasionally, Goodnight
Unknown comes across as slightly random and not fully formed (the noisy
“One Machine, One Long Flight” or the plodding “Praise”), but Lou Barlow has
produced a CD filled with moments of brilliance and true emotional heft, even
if it doesn’t always hold together as well as it might.
