Rarely have members of history’s great duos—Thelma and Louise, Simon and Garfunkel, Williams and Sonoma—used each other as an excuse to be so bawdy as guitarist Stephen Barling and cellist Brandon Collins. On their new full-length, New World Odor, Barling and Collins casts a demented eye toward silly topics: e-mail spam, staying up all night and a bunch of other stuff that can’t be mentioned in this family-friendly paper.
It’s the deadpan delivery and that makes their new record an undeniably fun listen. Barling sounds like a foul-mouthed Loudon Wainwright who never gets sentimental, sings kind of like the guy from Lit, hasn’t left town in far too long.
And they have indeed been here for a long time: Barling used to write under the moniker Cripsy Duck for this paper; they’ve played weekly at Miller’s for six years; and together they backed former Tokyo Rose owner Atsushi Miura in his band, the Dirty Round Eyes.
While the songs on the duo’s follow-up to 2004’s Puberty and Justice for All might not reach the heights of Miura’s “I Hate Charlottesville,” there are plenty of local shout-outs and gripes to be enjoyed on the hour-long record. On “Charlottesville Lady Arm Wrestlers” (Go Punctuator!), “The ref says she’s going to need more than looks, so I bought his ass off with a stack of CLAW bucks.”
Barling sings on “Nascar People Rule the World” that the aforementioned “keep drinking when they hurl,” and “get all the pretty girls”—by the time “best” appears in this verse, the question for the next is not “if” but “how” Barling will rhyme it with “breast.” Listening to music hasn’t made me so uncomfortable since I first heard “Date Rape” by Sublime.
But it’s funny, often virtuosic and totally local. There’s a full hour of the stuff on this disc. What more could you want?
