Name: Brad Barr (of The Barr Brothers) & La Force
Start: 2024-11-13T18:00:00-05:00
Location: 8 N Winooski Ave , Burlington, VT, United States, Vermont 05401

Brad Barr (of The Barr Brothers) & La Force

All Ages
$25 adv | $30 dos
7pm doors | 7:30pm show
𝘽𝙧𝙖𝙙 𝘽𝙖𝙧𝙧
Over a career that spans three decades, Brad Barr has cultivated a uniquely visceral, disarmingly intimate approach to the guitar. If you’re already a fan of the Montreal-based Barr Brothers, or the legendary improv-rock trio The Slip, then you already know — it’s futile to try and categorize his ongoing experiments in sound and songwriting.
It’s a never-ending quest of sorts. The Providence, RI native is ever searching for an expression that’s free of cliches and idioms, universal in spirit, bold as love. His approach petitions you to lean in and listen — as if that, more than anything, were the point of it all. To be of service to the moment. His song-writing speaks with us — not at us — with both a confessional wisdom and a child’s eye; with the hope of seeing the world and its dusks and dawns and dreams like it did the first time.
Hidden depths emerge. In something as quotidien as “the blues”, Brad Barr’s ear picks up the strains of a borderless sound that has criss-crossed the world for thousands of years. Carnatic ragas flow seamlessly into the Mississippi Delta. The oblong rhythms of the Sahel are imbibed by the sage and smoke of a Navajo love song. The telluric forces of the Earth heave through the open portal of an amplified guitar.
His musical journeys, almost always in lockstep with sibling drummer Andrew Barr, have taken them on chimerical paths: from all-night sets at jam festivals to the main stages of Newport Folk and Montreal Jazz; from tightly focused avant-rock collaborations to atmospheric reverb-laced folk ballads. Starting in the mid-90s, their trio The Slip built a global cult following for their wide-ranging compositions and deeply improvisational sets. When the two brothers moved to Montreal in 2005, they started a new chapter with experimental harpist Sarah Pagé and formed the Barr Brothers. The ensuing three albums have each been nominated for a Juno award, and they have shared the bill with such artists as My Morning Jacket, Calexico, Bela Fleck, The War on Drugs, Tinariwen, Built to Spill, The Prodigy, Emmylou Harris, and others.
Amidst the pandemic, Brad released his second instrumental recording, called THE WINTER MISSION (Secret City Records), with a simple rule: just the guitar. Its raw, unsettling intimacy is described as “an album of riches that needs to be given plenty of listens and plenty of time. It will certainly reward you.”
At the heart is an artist who is constantly reinventing himself — whether in the studio or in front of audiences — and the mystery of what might happen next is always there. There is an accumulated treasure trove of songs, both lyric and instrumental, from his thirty-plus years of constant exploration; and there is Brad himself, already leaning into the next turn, trying mostly to surprise himself… and the listener is along for the ride.
https://www.instagram.com/bradbarr216/
https://open.spotify.com/artist/6FHxCoGlbKV6cvqO2AMaKv?si=459fe12da04b490a&nd=1&dlsi=03ab91fcf66349d5
𝙇𝙖 𝙁𝙤𝙧𝙘𝙚
XO Skeleton is the supple, steady, uncanny new album by La Force: a mixture of haunted pop and hot-blooded R&B that glistens at the meeting-point between life, death and love. “In dreams, the dead and living are the same,” Ariel Engle sings on “October,” her voice shimmering. “Maybe that’s why I’m better in the dark.”
“The theme of the album revealed itself in the making,” Engle told me. The title track found its seed in a telephone call between the singer and her life-insurance broker—everyday banalities on the periphery of death. “At one point she said, ‘God forbid you should die,’” Engle recalled. “I was gobsmacked. And a bit hot-tempered. And I said those lines—‘Well, there’s one thing guaranteed: no god or goddess is going to keep me alive.’”
The finality of death? The protection that another person’s love can or cannot bestow? These are heady questions. But more than that they are body questions, matters of breath and flesh and pulse, which is the stuff at the centre of all of La Force’s music—beginning on her 2018 debut and also outward, into Engle’s electrifying work with Broken Social Scene, Big Red Machine, Efrim Menuck, Safia Nolin, and AroarA, her duo with her husband, Andrew Whiteman. La Force’s voice is stunning—somehow luscious and also wise—but so is her point of view—steady, sensitive, physical.
With this LP, Engle originally intended to make a dance record. She worked on cigar-box guitar, piano; she visited NYC for a few days in studio with pros. But everything felt rushed, or forced—and of course the veil of COVID descended over everything—so her music-making shifted home. “It was such an intensely interior time,” she said. Engle’s old friend, co-producer Warren Spicer (Plants and Animals), would come over around “toast o’clock” and they’d work in her basement until lunch, allowing songs to unfold at heartbeat pace, unhurried. This would continue off-and-on for two whole years—a process deeply affected by the place where it took place. “I grew up in this house,” she said. “It’s where my dad died. It’s where I got married. It’s both completely dead and completely alive.” And also itself a kind of exoskeleton—a structure at the threshold between La Force’s inner and outer worlds.
Engle says she has been “unhealthily obsessed” with death since she was a child. “For years I couldn’t look at a night sky because I couldn’t contemplate eternity.” XO Skeleton is therefore a kind of reckoning: a coming-to-terms with the oblivion that bookends a life, but also the “gooey centre” of love, loss, touch, and memory. The skeleton inside of each of us, that symbol of death, is also literally the thing that animates us—which brings us alive. And our bodies, which offer up all the scars and bruises of our years, also carry the intangible: desire, tenderness, judgment.
These nine extraordinary songs are human-scale and intimate, with chord changes like the shifting of limbs, saxophones and processed strings that travel with a vascular ripple. Listen to “How Do You Love A Man,” with its nimble bass and swooning groove, and a title that winks at the beyond. This isn’t some corny love song—its fuller title would be “How Do You Love A Man (Who Doesn’t Know That You Love Him).” Engle asks us how we love the dead; and what to make of this one-way loving, where we have only the memory of reciprocation.
Throughout these 35 minutes, La Force’s music is electric + vivid, and also tactile + grimy—a sound that enfolds influences as disparate as Tirzah, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Jazmine Sullivan, the Cocteau Twins, Mica Levi, Tricky w/ Marina Topley-Bird, and even Joni Mitchell’s “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter.” XO Skeleton bends and turns with its every shift of pulse—mournful, searching, turned on. Like a body, you might say. Or the memory of one.
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