fakejazz.com

The target audience for a Sentridoh album used to be pretty clear: Barlow completists only. The lack of a full time band has given Barlow time to more fully realize these new solo recordings, however the songs aren't any better than the cast-offs that made their way on to the old Sentridoh albums. There are a few gems for sure, definitely enough for the decreasing legions of Barlow completists to be content with the album. "HOME," the inverted title cut, is a dark somber slice of home baked electronica, using acoustic guitar, electric bass, and a few layers of synthesizers, along with cello and some found object percussion. As far as emo(h)tional content, this one ranks on the "Rebound" side of the scale, so generalized that it's hard to relate to and exists solely as a pop song. "Puzzle" is one of the few songs here that breaks that boundary. Lou's best songs, ten or twenty years ago, showed him struggling to find love and excited to finally find it. In "Puzzle," we find him in the ebb and flow of a long term committed relationship, finding how the lifelong struggle with love changes. The metaphor perhaps isn't the most poetic, but the song is very effectve. While maybe Emoh fails to give the clear link to Barlow's soul that his best works did, even the album's throwaway tracks have their charm. In the spirit of his previous cover of Brian Adams' "Run To You," Ratt's "Round-N-Round" gets the Barlow treatment, stripping away all the glam (and hairspray), leaving little more than voice and guitar. Barlow makes the song seem maybe even sentimental and charming, if you ignore the terrible cliches like "arrow through my heart." Throwaway "The Ballad of Daykitty" also is pretty charming, mostly because Lou is so unashamed of devoting a song to kitty he adopted. Perhaps a decade ago he would have tried to "hip" it up by pretending it's a metaphor (or avoid it altogether), but here he doesn't hold anything back. While being too cute works for Lou on his song about a cat, it doesn't work on his song about Christianity. The sarcasm of "Mary" treds overdone territory and isn't exactly a new take on the story (gee, maybe Mary wasn't a Virgin after all). One could say this whole album treds overdone territory, but aside from "Mary" it's almost entirely the territory Barlow is so good at. So while Emoh probably still isn't recommended for anyone but the Barlow completist, similar to all those old Sentridoh albums, it's still a necessary part to the completist's collection.

Lou Barlow at Amazon & Insound