This four track self titled ep from TRIM THE BARBER offers enough head melting electronics to keep your jaw dropping but possibly not quite enough soul to melt your heart. Their mixing of shoe gaze and minimalist post punk quickly recalls The Cure and Wire in a way that’s much easier to admire than to truly fall in love with.
It’s a debut of some stunning moments. Last track Reality transforms the guitar riff from Joy Division’s Transmission into continent sized proportions, sounding like Noel Gallagher and Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood locked in a ‘Walk This Way’ style duel. Occupation slowly unfolds with tessellating guitars reminiscent of The Chameleons set against some great tribal drumming. There’s also the final few moments of guitar destruction in Autocue that sound like a thousand pissed off wasps trapped in a glass jar being forced to swallow lightning.
For all these exceptional examples, the songs never really become more than the sum of their parts. Despite some fantastic atmospherics, opener Occupation remains just an opener. Lyrics throughout the ep are smothered in the mix and spat out like pellets. When they’re recognisable, they’re pretty awful, such as Digital’s attempt to become a rabble rousing anthem against our dependence on technology. This worst offender begins with the hollow couplet “Where are the records you would put on display, they’re stuck in your hard drive they’re hidden away” and even name checks a popular Samsung mobile phone before resting on the meaningless chorus of “You can’t pixilate me”. As a band who will probably attempt to conscript a fan-base from the usual Soundcloud and Facebook sources, you really wonder what’s going on in their heads.
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That said, there’s easily enough raw ingredients to suggest Trim The Barber could be an impressive, if somewhat gothy, proposition. Their two guitar assault is probably a breathtaking spectacle in a tiny club but on record it still needs a little more craft to have the same effect. This debut may very well be worth picking at and chewing over; however there doesn’t seem to be quite enough here to ferociously gourmandise just yet.
Listen to Trim the Barber at Bandcamp
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