Human Barbie Releases Debut Album“Get a Life” Today
In drawing on past influences, Get a Life fixes a marker on the state and sound of Indie Pop for the 2020s
When I talk about music, I always make an effort to also present some part of the history of music. At some point in the past, a friend and I agreed to develop something of a genealogy of music genres, like a visual representation of where trends in music come from and where they go. I think similar projects have been accomplished along these lines in the past, and I want to say, Wikipedia does at least some service to the project when it talks about musical genres’ influences and derivatives. So the project, which was far too big for two dudes to do it as hobbyists and music lovers alone, was abandoned… in that form at least. It has been surreptitiously continued, however on my own blog.
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With this, we come to Indie music. Specifically the various brands of indie rock, pop and folk. And this brings us squarely up to today’s debut of an exceptionally pretty and quite emotional record called Get a Life, by Human Barbie. It arrives today on Poor Man Records, and was digitally handed to me by my friend Amber, who is the singer for a great post-punk group in LA called Broken Baby. Without tipping the hand too far, I will highly recommend this record for all who really dig that Bedroom Pop sound which is going around these days and is the summary of two decades and more of music development following the collapse of the scenes in the early 2000s. The record is extremely well done, and presents a dreamy soundscape that draws on solid indie influences, but also showcases the band’s artistic mastery of instrumentation and song construction.
First, let’s go back… Way back to the early 2000s. Waking up from the hangover called post-Grunge, we find ourselves squarely in a world dominated, on the one hand, by music I have lovingly referred as the “Take a Dump School” of Modern Rock exemplified by Nickleback and Creed, and on the other, infectious but absolutely innocuous pop drivel made by countless Britney- and Backstreet-clones, who had the aesthetic of the originals, but none of the actual talent or edge. Hip Hop was just emerging from the Shiny Suit era, and Backpack was popular among the Heads, but had not filtered to the rest of the country yet. The musical landscape was a deadzone.
Into this sterile, conservative, infinite xerox of a xerox sonic hellscape, LoFi saw a moment and burst forth like an explosion. The first inklings of the Indie revolution were already in place as early as 2000, and featured rockers who wanted to move music forward once more by undoing the corrosive effects of the crass commercialization that murdered much of music by 1995. As so often happens in music, to get back to “good,” folks have to strip out the excess garbage that makes music palpable to the zillions of teenagers who have lots of money and follow trends, and just actually play rock for people who’s tastes are a bit more mature. The LoFi Garage Revival did this and then some.
If you think about it, “New York City Cops”, by the Strokes, and “Fell in Love with a Girl”, by the White Stripes, both released in 2001, are almost oldies now, but back then, these LoFi Indie rockers were hailed as the “saviors of Rock,” despite Pitchfork famously panning the Strokes’ debut record, — proving once more that Hipsters don’t actually know anything about good music. These two vanguard bands kicked open the doors for countless Indie Rock bands, like Franz Ferdinand, The Killers, who wrote the song literally called “Glamorous Indie Rock and Roll,” cementing their place in Indie Music History forever, Interpol, The Black Keys, who actually formed directly after the release of Its this It?, and one of my favorite indie rock bands of all time, The Ting Tings.
The influence of the LoFi Garage Revival movement, if you want to call it that, on music in the 2000s is undeniable and still reverberates today, especially in Grunge- and Alternative-Revival music such as Silversun Pickups and this Big Rock barn burner from tummyache, which keeps the HUGE rock sound of the first part of the 1990s, but is still far more indie than any record ever produced for SubRock or DGC could ever dream of being! As of 2020, I am happy to report that Indie Rock, though now in the underground, is still alive and well, and loved by people with good taste in music.
At the same time as the rockers were kicking out the jams with guitars, drums, stripped down production techniques and independent record labels, pop musicians were in their own state of foment. The same paths blazed by the Strokes, the Stripes, and the Killers were also being traveled by indie pop, and even anti-pop musicians. In the early 2000’s, you could hear music which sounded almost poppish, like pop in that it wasn’t loud and rocking garage-style, but it didn’t sound like the corporatized mainstream of music at all. There were elements of folk, classical and hip hop all borrowed into Indie and mixed into a big soup.
Arguably the greatest artist in this Indie Pop goulash was Lily Allen. She was unapologetically British, and her songs seemed to be a mix of a very upbeat tunes musically, with lyrics that were about loss, being cheated on, materialism and the sellout involved in material culture, or in many cases, just hatred of idiotic things like American Presidents. Other musicians who worked in this genre include the person I personally tend to associate with anti-pop, pianist and singer Regina Spektor, who’s music evokes tears in me, from time to time, unlike ANY pop song I have ever heard. Other musicians in the Indie Pop field include Little Jackie, who mixed Hip Hop with a distinctly Motown-ca.-1967 sound, Gnarles Barkley, which featured CeLo Green on vocals, and DJ Danger Mouse on production and so forth.
A retro-oriented, “revisitation and resynthesis of past styles” type of instrumentation and production technique has always been characteristic of Indie in the 2000s. Many artists took old music aesthetics, chopped them up and mixed them together, both to crate a sound that is rooted in a solid musical tradition that people are deeply familiar with, and at the same time, always felt new and fresh. In this way, even old ideas are prevented from becoming stale, and what you think you know could take an unexpected twist and suddenly restore a flagging interest in a band or a genre.
Alongside the more upbeat style of Indie Pop, bands began branching out into more emotional, introspective, slower, quieter songs. One major highlight for the quieter form of Indie Pop was the extremely influential 2003 album by the Postal Service called Give Up released on SubPop. This record is the side project for Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard and producer Jimmy Tamborello, and featured Jenny Lewis on most of the tracks. The music on this record is almost completely produced by synthesizers and sequencers, though there are guitars in places. Give Up demonstrated that music which is lush and beautiful and haunting and professional could basically be produced almost completely outside the studio. The album was recorded, for the most part, via correspondence, where music tracks by Tamborello were sent to Gibbard who then sent music back and forth and so on, while the vocals were actually recorded in a studio over just a couple days.
Give Up also proved that records could easily be produced on electronic pro-tools like Cool Edit Pro/Adobe Audition, using a laptop and a mixer, but further, that they could then be easily distributed — a happy coincidence given the rise of music sharing in the early 00s and the eventual arrival of MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and SoundCloud. In this way, the Indie Pop sound of Give Up was way more influential on the next nearly 2 decades of music than even its platinum album status would suggest — It is not only an excellent and almost universally loved record, but it was very ground breaking as a technical achievement.
The massive success of The Postal Service’s record generated interest in this quieter form of Pop, which cannot be called soft-rock, but would instead morph into what was later referred to as Bedroom Pop. Following The Postal Service’s debut, we will see the arrival of bands and artists like Iron and Wine, Bon Iver who produces music to fall asleep to, Plain White Ts, Vance Joy who’s famous song was accompanied by a video which made no sense at all to someone who was not in on the joke, Arkansas sunshine-rockers Knox Hamilton, and more recently, a band recently recommended to me by the next generation of music connoisseurs, the Bedroom Pop Dayglow, who gets me almost to where I need to be to begin writing the review about Human Barbie’s album.
Embedded deep down in the heart and soul of the 00s LoFi Indie Pop movement is a subgenre called Indie Folk. I was not a fan of much of the Indie Folk movement, though there are some notable standouts. There was Indie Folk as a subgenre of Alternative back in the 90s, but in the 2000s, after alternative was mainstream for a while, Indie Folk began reaching much further back than the Celtic-inspired Lilith Fair style of Indie Folk (think Sarah McLachlin) and the hippy music of John Prine, Dan Bern and Jack Johnson. It’s like someone told musicians to draw from the deep roots of Americana where they learned the instrumentation and the choral singing styles and inexplicably decided to bring them forward more than 100 years into the present.
I would argue that a lot of the influence in Indie Folk scene of the 2000s and early 2010s came from the bluegrass band Old Crow Medicine Show. The OCMS, and musicians closely associated with them enjoyed a heyday around the immensely popular movie from 2000, “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” All of a sudden, you hear of normal people listening to hootenanny tunes on Prairie Home Companion and talking about musicians like Gillian Welch and the Old Crow Medicine Show. A lot of old school country musicians got a boost including Loretta Lynn, who recorded a whole record with Jack White while White was blowing out amplifiers with the Stripes, Johnny Cash, who recorded his last couple extremely successful records right before passing away in 2003, Dolly Parton, whose song Jolene has been covered WAY more in the last 20 years than it ever was in the 20th Century, including by honorary GenXer Miley Cyrus and the White Stripes themselves, and Townes Van Zandt, who died in 1997, while a quarter of his catalog was released after his passing. OCMS is so influential in the hootenanny style that their song Wagon Wheel has been covered by Darius “Hootie” Rucker (yes, THAT Hootie), and for millions of Americans, Rucker’s version is literally the only version they have ever heard.
Back to Indie Folk: This strange and sudden fascination with the banjo and the mandolin and complete abandonment of anything resembling an instrument invented after 1936 among some Indie musicians is most expressed in the sound of The Lumineers, Mumford and Sons, the Avett Brothers, especially earlier in their career, and Of Monsters and Men. This is music that I refer to as “Stompy” music, which makes me think of a massive singing troupe made up of the stereotypical late 19th Century eastern European immigrants arriving at Ellis Island. Mustachioed men, women with elaborate hairstyles, button-down shirts and aprons, bowler hats and three piece suits, mandolins, oversized bass drums and little street urchins pick-pocketting passers-by. It was a throwback to a time long before any of us was alive, utilizing analog instruments almost entirely, and thankfully most of these bands have evolved beyond making that theatrical stompy stompy music into other forms more resembling Indie Pop of the 10's.
All tied nicely together, the Indie sound of the 2000s can be characterized then as music that is actually independently produced, is easily disseminated via electronic forms, and borrows HEAVILY from older styles and aesthetics, utilizing a wide variety of instruments which haven’t been used in popular music for some time. Sometimes it is extremely loud, as in the case of the White Stripes, sometimes is it extremely quiet, in the case of someone like Bon Iver. It is occasionally synthesizer driven, and may even use a harpsichord without raising too many eyebrows. It takes from a vast number of styles and recombines these styles to produce a new synthesis. And it evolves, just like the music before it did. Outside of corporate acts and underground, and quite outside of the old bands who still hang around, Indie music, (rock, then folk and pop,) has defined American music in the 21st century thus far, and the indie modus operandi has found its way into most forms of music that exist beyond the edges of corporate music, including into the SoundCloud motifs of rap and hip hop.
So where does Human Barbie fit in?
Upon listening to the nine track album, which comes in at just under 28 minutes long Human Barbie’s debut album Get a Life is a showcase of the various elements which make up the style that Indie music has evolved into by 2020: Bedroom Pop. A quick google search for the term “Bedroom Pop” reveals that nearly all entries on the term are less than a year old. But it is what all the above has led to. The Bedroom Pop sound adopted by records like Get a Life, is the summation of the various strands of Indie Music woven together into a coherent style.
Bedroom pop is highly DIY and exemplifies the Indie production style. It is doubtful that huge studios and record labels who are singularly concerned with profitability would make music like this, in any way. Major labels who are interested in massive profit will create music that sells the most copies to the most people possible: meaning vapid teenagers who neither know, nor particularly care whether or not the music they are listening to is of good quality. They will bring in huge producers, and their production will cost millions of dollars. In the process of making music that is as acceptable as possible to any possible focus group one could constitute, these labels tend to sacrifice artistic integrity. The music that is produced in that method comes off as soulless: Probably because eighty takes of the same song must be recorded to even approximate the overdubbing required for modern pitch shifted pop music. By the end of that process, there is no feeling left in the song.
Get a Life is the opposite of that. The whole record has the feeling of something which is not polished to the point of losing definition. This is not to say that the music is not professional. Quite the contrary: This album clearly screams love of music by the artist. If Human Barbie DID do 80 takes of the same song, it was definitely not to allow the studio to clean up the track, but to get the right one instead. Nothing on this record sounds simple, nothing sounds half done or shortcutted.
The choices made by the artist are clear, and the album retains a ton of aesthetic touches as well which hint at independent DIY production. For example, at the end of many of the tracks, there is a white noise buzz that cuts abruptly. This is a noise which a massive studio would have cut out using pro-tools and other recording tricks, but one which is unavoidable when recording on an analog 4 track. That little imperfection, which would be unnoticable unless you were looking for it, or unless you have dealt with it in the past while making your own DIY tapes in your bedroom, is an unmistakable sign of the recording process that takes this record almost completely out of a studio and gives it a human touch that so many records lack entirely today.
The instruments Human Barbie chooses on this record are practically ancient. In addition to incorporating the various strains of Indie, the album borrows heavily from the Baroque Pop genre that was made famous in the 1960s by bands like The Beatles, the Zombies, The Beach Boys and The Left Banke, who’s song “Walk Away Renee” utilizes a harpsichord and a string section and flute alongside modern instruments. On Get a Life, you will hear harpsichords, which always hearken back to the past, pianos as well as pipe organ sounds which approach calliope levels in a spot, a Hammond organ, and synthesized french horns. These choices, which you do not hear on music after the 1970s, almost make his normal electronic keyboard, when it appears, seem rather passé in comparison.
As for guitars, I also appreciated the final mixes which moved his bass a bit forward in the music. A lot of producers will push the the bass back so the cymbals are heard over the bass and the lead guitars can stand out. But this mix allows the bass guitar to shine, over the drums, which could be called understated — another hallmark, I would imagine, of recording drums not in a studio, but, perhaps in a rented house, where your neighbors will call the cops for loud drum playing. The electric bass, on the other hand, can be recorded straight into a monitor with earphones on it, and so the gain can be increased without violating noise ordinances.
Human Barbie utilizes a mix of acoustic guitars, most often for rhythm purposes, and electric leads. One of my favorite touches is the use of the glass slide on several songs to produce an airy, dreamy soundscape that also connects the song to both the indie pop genre and situates it into the emotional context of Bedroom Pop. The guitars are never too powerful, and never overpower the vocals, which often have cavernous effects on them. The guitars and drums go well together in these songs.
Percussion consists often of brushed snares, some light fills on the traps, and tambourines, especially on songs like “The Moment”, which comes closest, in parts, to the Indie folk traditions of the late 2000s that it draws heavily from. In the song “The Crystal Mirror”, the percussion consists almost exclusively of a small finger cymbal or triangle of some sort. It would be a safe bet that percussion is not the focus of this record, though I will say, the use of it is certainly fits well to the overall feel of the songs which utilize it.
Finally, vocals themselves often remind me at times of of Thom Yorke of Radiohead, and at others of Stuart Murdoch from Belle and Sebastian, or Boots Copeland of Knox Hamilton. Singer Christopher Leopold sings many of his songs on the higher end of the male register, and this gives his music a certain vulnerability which many male singers lack. Doing so also opens the door to a more emotional and introspective lyricism than you will find outside the genre. Other times, the lyrics are almost whispered, and certainly add an airy tone to the songs.
Overall, the record discusses dreams and imagination, the pain associated with love which fleeted, and the pressure to give up on your dreams by the expectations of others. These topics are all of the mind and the experience of, not quite the senses, so much as the perception of those senses. That sort of moody, perceptual theme, which crosses the entire album and ties it together into a single piece of work, is both very subjective, as in it describes the main character’s outlook on the world, rather than the world itself, and also somewhat universal, as most people do view the world in their minds, and few will ever be able step outside their minds to experience the world objectively.
The record is a dolorous one: Full of sorrow, and almost a frustration, in some parts. One of my first impressions of the record was that these songs often reminded me of the sadder songs of one of my favorite bands of all time, The Cardigans. A lot of the Cardigans’ songs were deeply sad and pitiful, despite the music often being upbeat and fun. Later in their career, when they moved away from the Lounge sound they started with, and especially when they began exploring more emotional subject matter in Long Gone Before Daylight, one could easily draw thematic lines between that record and this one. These same emotions are conveyed excellently by the music on Get a Life. I would imagine that you would get that feeling even if you didn’t listen to any of the words.
But then again, the lyrics themselves can be downright nihilistic, and in that sense, they come across almost in a “laugh to keep from weeping” way. I think for example of the Bahamas-esque song, “Be Careful What You Wish For.” This track contains a fantastic summary of dashed hopes in the lyric “Be careful what you wish for/ cause you’re gonna get f — ed eventually.” That lyric, I know, is supposed to evoke a feeling of “why even try then?” but it brings a cynical smile to my Gen X mouth every time I hear it. I think: this guy understands the way my generation feels about the world in general! Keep your expectations low, folks, because you ain’t gonna get it anyway.
A few pieces, like the lead track “We Disappeared” strays into psychedelic territory by the end of the song, a la Tame Impala, while “The Crystal Mirror” sounds almost like progressive rock, and connects numerous neo-madrigal songs from the 1960s which seem to have been written and performed in the midst of the imagination of someone who has eaten a ton of LSD, with some of the more pastoral songs that Led Zeppelin wrote from Bron-Yr-Aur. “The Truth Is Coming” is another ethereal track that evokes, for me, a stop at the famous Roy’s Gas Station on Route 66 in Amboy California, out in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The guitars on this track utilize a straight reverb effect that made me think of the old surf rock of Dick Dale, and meanwhile, the chorus fx on the vocals drew my mind away to Mazzy Star’s dream pop classic “Fade Into You”, which coincidentally had a video that, if not shot in Amboy, was shot somewhere near by.
Other songs are closer to the Americana/Indie Folk stylings of the late 00s. I think here of the lead single from the Album, the eponymous “Get a Life.” This track features the most lush production of the entire record, and contains many elements used by that now abandoned stompy sound of the Lumineers, et alia, especially in the chord progressions of the verses. On top of this is layered a chorus which I think draws comparison to Radiohead from back in the day when they still made accessible music, and a surprise coda that picks up an Avett-ish echo.
I would say that the most upbeat track, and perhaps my favorite on the record is called “Portrait of a Life in Bloom” which is almost lithe compared to the heavier songs on the album. Even though the happiness the singer describes is certainly ephemeral, and so much so that he is not even sure if it exists, or if its just a dream, he is happy to grab hold of the happiness. This song makes me think of the work that Age Pryor did on the Eagle Vs. Shark soundtrack, and the playful vibe of this song really stands out from the record. The song is almost impressionistic in its depiction of nature and feelings and paints a vivid mental picture for the listener. Feelings, like life experiences on a perfect day, are fleeting, and they should be enjoyed while they are really there — They can vanish any day.
The best thing about Get a Life by Human Barbie is how well it stylistically lays out the state of indie pop in this day and age. I think anyone interested in the LoFi Bedroom Pop sound would certainly fall in love with this record. Sonicly, it is not a hard record to listen to: it is the kind of music you can play while scrolling through your twitter, but it is also the kind of music you will want to sit down with and listen to closely, because it is musically interesting — It doesn’t sound like everything else you will hear today. I admit: It draws a ton of influence from past sounds, but this is not the same as being a carbon copy of what you will get when you put a song into Spotify and let it create your next infinite playlist. If Bedroom Pop is the kind of music people are discovering right now, this record is cutting edge. If you are looking for something that is familiar, and know anything about music from the last 20 years (which sadly too few people listening to music these days do) then you will feel right at home with this record.
This is the direction that music is pointed in these days. And though I personally will always prefer distorted guitars to acoustic guitars, and music designed to inspire outward revolution over inward introspection, I can also appreciate pretty music. This is I think one of the ironic aspects of this record: It talks a lot about loneliness and misery and failure and frustration, but it is a very pretty record. There are no sharp edges, nor does it require or elicit sympathy from the listener. Like a good piece of art, it is there, for the listener to appreciate, and feel whatever they will feel. It sounds good, and there are a number of important little things that humanize the record, beyond the lyrics.
If this is where pop music is going, then I am for it. I highly recommend this record, and hope you take a listen to it, for its own sake, of course, but also, with an ear to appreciate the 20 years of musical development that led to this particular date, when this particular record was released. And then, if you like it, it is available for you to buy to support the artist on Bandcamp.
Now that you’ve read the review, check out the record on Spotify! And thank you for reading! And listen to the whole thing, in the order it is presented. It is an album. These songs are in this order for a reason and they do not stand alone.
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