You gotta save my Soul

London based trio Little Barrie formed in 2000 with vocalist and guitarist Barrie Cadogan, bassist Lewis Wharton and Wayne Fulwood on skins and on backup-vox duties. They released a handful of singles for small labels like Showdown and Stark Reality and then got signed to Genuine Recordings and began laying down the foundation for what would become their debut proper, We are Little Barrie. Oh, and it even got produced by freakin' A-Girl-Like-You-indie-pop-legend Edwyn Collins!

I first heard about them when I got sampled with that album of theirs as a buyer for another music shop. (You know, one of those crappy big overpriced stores that have 80% crap and the 20% good stuff is marked up twice as much as those other soulless titles on hand.)
Delving in rock, blues, soul, and funk it really hit a soft spot with me, but something somehow was lacking or missing. There was no real staying power, it was fun to listen to when the mood would hit but it would easily be forgotten soon after.

With their new album, the title rather aptly named since they went through an apparently tumultuous time and ended up having to recruit new drummer, Billy Skinner, we see them standing on erm, firmer ground... On Standing Your Ground, they bring the funk like Soulive does... Well that is if Soulive was a garage band similar to the Sonics round the time of the splendid Motown era and the members grew up on their parents' Jimi Hendrix, Cream and Traffic collections. Like a Delta Temptations experience, or perhaps a way looser more poppy Rare Earth?

That with this new album they are on Wall of Sound also makes sense if you think about The Bees (before they became A Band of...) and their cover of A Minha Menina that was a Wall of Sound (sunshine hit me) single... You know, the winning recipe of taking a rock band with a funky sound that sprinkle tightly jammed grooves with hooks to boot and then production wise fatten up the basslines.

Love You kicks out the jams in almost a rockabilly fashioned version of Jet's Are you gonna be my Girl , just with a lesser bpm. I would probably start dropping it on the dancefloor inbetween The Count Five's Psychotic Reaction and The Detroit Cobras' cover of Hey Sailor. Pretty Pictures pretty much follows suite but with more of a Sons and Daughters feel adding a great surfy tremelo and slide, while We Know You is a lofty Hendrixesque Castles made of Sand type lullabye. The album as a whole is way more consistent than the last and already has me eagerly antcipating thier next. Top notch!

Love You
We Know You
Pretty Pictures
+ Myspace

Give me a microphone
and I will sing my soul

- Ri