Review Summary: Drummer wanted. Apply within.
The rise of streaming and sharing platforms as viable ways to publish and publicise artistic works has helped revolutionised the way underground artists gain exposure and attain career progression. What used to take years of grind and undying faith in a stroke of luck became a matter of uploading a few files to some platform or another, connecting with the right people on the right social network, and let viral word-of-mouth do the rest. Suddenly, it was much easier for indie film-makers to have their films funded, young writers to have their novels published, and of course, underground musicians to put out their own independent releases. And while this new paradigm has, inevitably, led to a million derivative, dime-a-dozen works cluttering the likes of Bandcamp and Netflix, it has also made it possible for a few truly innovative and ground-breaking artists and acts to reach a level of exposure they might not otherwise have enjoyed.
Just such an act were Barfighter, a Kentucky-based, classic-format instrumental power trio bent on reviving psychedelic hard rock sounds from decades past. Appearing from seemingly out of nowhere in late 2019, and shrouded in absolute mystery (none of the members was ever named, any type of social media presence was conspicuously nonexistent, no interviews or PR pieces about the band ever surfaced, and even the one available picture of the band is deliberately fuzzed-out) the band set about releasing their crushing slabs of heavy/doom/psych rock, three at a time, and at an astonishing rate, putting out no less than four EPs in the space of just over six months. This work ethic (reminiscent, much like the band’s sound, of the early years of rock and metal music) bore the inevitable question of how long they could keep it up for – a question which was promptly answered when, after putting out the explicitly-titled
Barfighter 4 in June 2020, the band vanished into the ether, not to be heard from again for the rest of the year. What might, at first, have been taken for a breather from a deliberately manic release schedule soon became closer to a full-blown hiatus, as 2020 turned to 2021 with nothing yet forthcoming from the once-prolific band.
Then, on January 18, 2021 – just over a year after the release of Barfighter’s debut EP – a strange message reached fans’ Bandcamp inboxes. Simply reading
’If you don’t have this one yet – it is time', and complete with a few dozen product codes, the message linked, not to the long-expected
Barfighter 5, but rather to the debut release for a new band, Bearded Executive – who provided little to no information about themselves, preferring to use up their copy blurb with deliberately vague, if on-brand, corporate jargon, and whose sole band picture was deliberately fuzzed-out, though not
quite enough to hide the similarities between the two gentlemen depicted and two of the three members of Barfighter…
Any doubts which may have persisted going into said debut release – mainly stemming from the fact that the new project is billed as hailing from Portland, Oregon, while Barfighter were from Kentucky – will be dissipated a minute or so into opening track
Prescriptive Guidance, when the distinctive Barfighter lead guitar tone cuts into what had, until then, been a fairly nondescript ZZ Top-style blues-rock boogie. By the time the duo break out the same musical motif that got re-hashed and re-worked in every single Barfighter release since the very first EP (on follow-up
Best Practices), the mystery has been solved – yes, Bearded Executive are just Barfighter in disguise. Now apparently based off a completely different location, and down one member, the two remaining musicians must have wanted a clean break, explaining the option for a new name and concept, if not musical identity.
In fact, the bulk of
The Enterprise Scale consists of the ‘Barfighter sound’ – that unique, Sabbath-meets-Kyuss cocktail of fuzzed-out blues-rock, desert rock and proto-doom metal which worked gangbusters across the group’s four EPs – with the bluesier, boogier side being represented on the aforementioned
Prescriptive Guidance, while
Best Practices brings back the sort of monolithic, Sabbathical riffs not heard since
Barfighter 2. This time, however, there is a twist in the band’s tail, which becomes apparent somewhere between the final minute of
Guidance and the first thirty seconds of follow-up
Best Practices, and directly involves the other mystery surrounding this new band and release – namely, which of the three members flew the coop, unwittingly precipitating the change in identity. Much like the question surrounding said identity, however, this new conundrum does not take more than a few minutes to crack; in fact, the answer becomes abundantly, almost painfully clear about halfway through the second track, when the slight whiff of ZZ Top exuded by the opener is suddenly explained as the one element the opener had successfully managed to conceal up until that point becomes exposed – namely, the use of a drum machine.
Yes, at some point in their transition from drinking-hole brawlers to fully synergised corporate entity, these gentlemen have lost their drummer – and, in true cost-cutting, budget-conscious corporate fashion, decided to fully automate the role. Unfortunately, said automation appears to have been delegated to the work-experience intern, resulting in a performance which, while initially functional, deteriorates sharply over the course of the EP’s thirteen minutes. By the time
Best Practices gives way to closer
Modular By Design, what started out sounding organic enough to almost pass for a real drummer has devolved to GarageBand free-sample drum loop levels, completely and utterly wrecking an otherwise sonically ambitious track, hinged around a hypnotic polka rhythm which the mechanical percussionist sadly falls a long way short of accomplishing. As a result, the song is rendered virtually unlistenable for the first few playthroughs of the album, nearly squandering whatever good will its two predecessors had accrued. Even after the listener knows what is coming and is prepared for the amateurish drum performance, the song never manages to rise above mediocrity, achieving the exact opposite effect as the other two tracks, which do assert themselves as growers in the long run.
In the end, this conscious choice to replace a departing member with an artificial alternative ends up having the opposite effect this type of practice usually has in the business world – rather than enhance or add efficiency to the band’s performance, it ends up detracting from the remaining two musicians’ efforts, dragging down what are already somewhat unremarkable compositions, and actively ruining the only truly innovative moment on the EP. If the use of a drum machine was a conscious choice, in line with the band’s newly adopted ‘soulless corporation’ gimmick, then it can only be seen as successful from an intentionally bad, wink-and-nudge perspective; if, as seems more likely, said choice was made in earnest, then it can only be construed as a show of poor judgement on the part of the two remaining Barfighters.
It is to the musicians’ credit, then, that even despite this glaring shortcoming,
The Enterprise Scale is not a
complete loss; in fact, the overall level of this new endeavour is about as good as the worst of the Barfighter EPs (
Barfighter 4), which in turn makes it a damn sight better than most of what Bandcamp deep dives usually yield. What works on this album
really works (the opener, in particular, is immense), and the nefarious effects of the poorly-programmed drum machine, while undoubtedly impactful, really come about too late in the game to derail the album as a whole. The band’s decision to halve the average length of their compositions (possibly to minimise the effects of the artificial percussion, though it may just have been that the departed drummer was the one who favoured longer songs) is also a wise one, as it keeps
Scale’s worse moments from dragging, while also leaving a slight hankering for more of its best.
All in all, the new project from the two anonymous Bearded Executives is nowhere near as bad as it sounds upon first listen; while never even coming close to the dizzying heights of Barfighter’s debut EP, it is a solid slab of instrumental psych-rock which, with a human drummer, would have easily been as good as – at least – their second outing. As it is, while significantly dragged down by the poorly-programmed artificial percussion, it nonetheless remains a perfectly serviceable, if slightly underwhelming, first chapter for this new project. Still, one cannot help but hope the two founding partners of this musical start-up will abandon their current automation-driven mindset, hire a suitable third wheel to replace their missing one, and once again aim for the incredibly high standard they once maintained. That
is, after all, the key to corporate success…
DOWNLOAD IT HERE: https://beardedexecutive.bandcamp.com/releases
Recommended Tracks
Prescriptive Guidance
