Reviews

Barcode Barcode cassette

Murfreesboro, Tennessee solo garage punk project. This is the debut release from BARCODE, which consists of four tracks of impossibly lo-fi recording quality. This tape is really interesting and the project seems like it could be very cool, but the lack of any sort of production makes it difficult to digest. Certain frequencies come through so harshly, mostly on the canned drums, that it becomes a bit of a chore to focus on and decipher, and I’m someone who loves when recordings are endearingly shitty. According to the label, all the tracks used on the four-track recording for this demo were recorded as voice memos on a phone. Perhaps that begins to explain why I have listened to it four times already and still can’t fully wrap my head around what I’m listening to. That isn’t to say that the songs are bad. Far from it, actually! The songwriting is pretty interesting, garage punk with drum machine dance beats and egg-punk chorus pedal twangy guitars. The vocals are delivered bizarrely lackadaisically, again perhaps due in part to the recording method. All in all it sounds like an egg-punk lo-lo-lo-fi bedroom pop project. I can’t wait for the recording setup to be upgraded in the slightest amount so that I can fully tell what BARCODE sounds like.