Barbarism by Katie Alice Greer

"Barbarism was written, performed, produced, and mixed entirely by Katie Alice Greer. It is profoundly singular, a graphic vision held completely by its individual perspective. It’s also a boundless and lush record, teeming with bluffs, charms, and jolts. In Greer’s words, “making this record felt like I was making an entire world.” This world is unnerving, loud. It evokes the bustle and momentum of a cartoon factory, orchestral gears threatening to grab your sleeve and yank you into a grinding embrace. Sometimes the accumulation of sound feels like a weapon in Greer’s hands, other times it’s a malevolent, drowning force she’s fighting against. In both cases, it’s fortunate that Greer has developed such command of her voice: to breeze atop this roar; to attack it in kind; to grow so crisply vulnerable that the song, shamed, twists itself into beauty.

Greer carefully sculpted each gesture on the record, contorting jangling guitars, sibilant hi-hats, even her own voice into thorny, unrecognizable corridors of sound. The creation of “How Do I Know (Pring 5)” provides a helpful example of this painstaking, gratifying process: “The wobbly guitar chord strums are me playing an acoustic through some tremolo,” explained Greer, “overprocessing it through a lot of filters. The original ‘beat’ of the song was a clip of a voice memo I recorded, where I turned it up really loud and looped the ‘bump’ sound over and over.” Greer likens this approach to the ripping, recontextualizing, gluing/ungluing process of collage. This technique reaches an extreme on the song “No Man,” which includes a substantial excerpt from Dorothea Lasky’s poem, “Porn.” Greer described the poem as a kind of cypher for Barbarism: “it describes such a specific and painful kind of self-imposed exile that is difficult to escape, and it's also funny.”

There’s a lyric in “Fake Nostalgia” that references a sixty-year-old episode of The Twilight Zone. The show’s plot is fundamental to the song, but the sheer mention of “Twilight Zone” produces so much thought: the friction between different eras; Rod Serling’s unironic seriousness; the idea that the fantastic can reveal truths too complicated for nonfiction. It makes the song hit harder without articulating any of those things; they just slide in when Greer sings the words "twilight zone." This is how the entire of Barbarism works – meaning is welded to every gesture. Again like a collage: there’s no phrase – musical or lyrical – that doesn’t drag behind it a chain of referents. A single descending string of notes might whisper Kate Bush, RZA, and Loveless without actually sounding like any of them. The same possibility is inherent in Barbarism’s flags, its guitar feedback, its bass kicks. In Greer’s fluid utterance of the word “sugar.” This is the tangled, significant landscape of Barbarism: a world alien enough to beguile yet familiar enough to crush you with your own empathy.

Barbarism is Katie Alice Greer’s first full-length solo LP, following three EPs. From 2012 – 2019, Greer was the vocalist for Washington D.C. punk band Priests, and co-founded the record label Sister Polygon."
-Ethan Swan

"Rainy day dream pop [...[ like Elliott Smith playing with Throbbing Gristle in a bad dream" - All Music

"Trippy, radical, weirdly life-affirming music" - Rolling Stone

photo by Kathryn Vetter Miller

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