It sucked that Lou Barlow’s incredible band Sebadoh petered out with
two tepid final records, and I never had much use for the Folk
Implosion, the band that briefly broke Barlow into the mainstream with
their yawn of a hit, “Natural One.”
Before all that, Barlow—in Sebadoh and during his three-album
stint in Dinosaur Jr.—had a hand in creating some of the best
music of the alternative-rock era. With his syrupy-sweet voice
confessing to everything from incestuous desire to homicidal rage, he
was lo-fi’s Sylvia Plath, helping to pioneer the bleak confessional
style that later blew up into that whole “emo” thing.
Now he’s releasing his second solo album, and it’s nice to have him
back. Barlow’s work has always fallen into two camps: the
stripped-down, heart-on-his-sleeve ballads of his Sentridoh persona,
and big-bottomed folk-rock numbers like “License to Confuse,” off
1994’s Bakesale. Goodnight Unknown has plenty of both:
“man-and-his-guitar” neo-folk like “Faith in Your Heartbeat” and “The
One I Call” (which swoons with unadorned prettiness), as well as louder
offerings like the excellent “Gravitate,” with its creepy organ-grinder
crescendos, and the relatively flat “Sharing,” which sounds
phoned-in.
“I’m thinking on the things that I avoid / Asking questions of
tomorrow / Betting on the tears that almost fall” Barlow sings on “I’m
Thinking … ,” proving that he hasn’t reinvented himself by any means
… but so what? There’s no other hyperbolic self-obsessed songsmith of
the ’90s that I’d rather listen to as the aughts come to an end.
This article appears in Oct 8-14, 2009.