Review Summary: Barn, because all the good names were taken before these guys were born.
(Because they look like they’re all fresh out of (or still in!) high school HAHA)
Barn is a band of fresh-faced death metalers formed in 2019 in Boise, Idaho. Featuring 8 tracks of grooving technical death metal and spanning a full 53 minutes, Barn (the album) is surprisingly competent for a debut album from such a young band. On Barn (the album), Barn (the band) focus on grooving technical death metal riffs underscored by just as varied and fill-heavy percussion. Mostly mid-paced crunching riffs twist along to a frenetic barrage of percussionist Dante Chandler-Haas’s fluid fill and kick-work on every song, making these 8 tracks feel in a way closer to drummer jam sessions than what could be expected of your typical technical death metal performance.
While typically death metal focuses its songwriting around varied guitar-work with the percussion running a central groove underneath, Barn (the band, the album) almost works opposite to that, with its percussive flourishes being so frequent that they act almost like a lead in themselves--the twin guitars instead acting as the true rhythmic backbone of the record.
While the song structuring of these tracks isn’t particularly varied, the insistence on a fun, grooving (mid) tempo creates a very head-banger-friendly (if samey) record. Despite being fairly stylistically one-dimensional, there are minor subtleties here and there, like the slight metalcore on “Skinface” or the very classically Death-esque progressive riffing of album closer “Barn” (the song).
The largest problem with Barn (the album) is actually its length and structuring. While most of the songs here do not go beyond six minutes, the final two pieces together total almost twenty-three minutes which is almost half the record’s total runtime. Both more progressive than their contemporaries, “Hatred” and “Barn” (the song) stick out from the preceding six tracks and very well could’ve been relegated to their own separate EP to make the rest of Barn (the album) stylistically a little more consistent and run closer to a much sleeker 30 minutes.
For a first effort, though, Barn (the album) is a solid achievement by Barn (the band). Despite being about twenty minutes too long for such a one-note album of this type, it’s still a rather fun one. Full of very fun riffing, endless drum noodling and a generally great sound design (the drums sound absolutely fantastic, albeit a bit loud), Barn is a very impressive debut. With a little more songwriting focus and a willingness to cut for time, Barn (the band) could be a band to look out for in the future.
The album cover’s also pretty neat. What is that pinkish outer space sea cucumber thing? Weird little dude. Cheq Barn. The band. The album.
