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Written by Glenn BurnSilver
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Friday, 17 November 2006 |
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 Most bands that are made up, at least in part, of brothers seem to endure a history of name-calling and fighting — Oasis, The Kinks, Nelson — and while that may add fuel to the collective songwriting fire, more than anything it makes good fodder for the tabloids.
It’s different, however, for The Slip, the three-piece avant-rock band from Boston. The band is composed of the brothers Barr — Andrew and Brad — plus Marc Friedman, who for all intents and purposes is brother No. 3.
“We’re more of a three-person entity,” Slip guitarist Brad Barr said during a recent conference call with the band.
The trio met in a high school music class and formed a fast camaraderie. Almost immediately they began sharing their diverse array of influences from Miles Davis to Taj Mahal, U2 to Can, John Coltrane to Frank Zappa.
The experiences of discovery while simultaneously learning an instrument lead the trio into an experimental realm.
“There is a certain chemistry thread that we wear on our sleeve as a band,” Barr continued. “We have the blood fabric that comes from learning together during the real developmental stages of our lives. That’s the secret of The Slip. We were trying to learn on an almost daily level.”
That aspect hasn’t changed for the band, which continually applies new influences to a growing sound that Barr rightly claimed to be “grander than before.”
Their latest album, “Eisenhower” (Bar/None) shifts from the early Slip days of heavy jamming and improvisation toward progressive song structures that manage to tackle arena rock, Lennon-esque pop levity, stripped down Americana, jerky post-punk friction, jazz fusion and prog-rock. The trio manages to do all this in a concrete manner. It is a continuum of what the band has done all along — find a way to fit everything in without noodling about.
“It is an attempt to get to what we were all three really hearing inside,” Barr said. “It really says a lot about where we are now.”
“I think some of the finest improvisation we have ever done is here, but the songs that have endured over time more are the rock songs, not so much the improvisational numbers,” drummer Andrew Barr explained. As songwriters “we’ve matured.”
“We have an instrumental prowess with the band, but we have found a happy medium with two-minute focused composed instrumental pieces that would then go into lyrical-based songs,” Brad Barr interjected. “There’s some complexity and then some de-complexity coupled together.”
“Eisenhower” comes five years after their previous album, “Angels Come On Time.” Most of that timespan was spent on the road organically expanding, learning, and storing away musical nuts for a future harvest that may be The Slip’s finest accomplishment.
“We needed the time to make this,” bassist Friedman said. “We really didn’t know what kind of album we wanted to make after ‘Angels.’ We had a whole new language and palate to use … the creative license to go wherever we want stylistically.”
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