Scotland Barr & The Slow Drags, Friday, April 18

[April 16th, 2008]

[GRITTY ROOTS-POP] Scotland Barr has come unstuck in time. One minute, he’s in Catholic school. The next, he’s walking through his hometown of Santa Cruz, or holed up in Montana with a flat-chested femme fatale. He’s drunk in a no-name bar, then suddenly sucked into “a distinct image of a fat, old Charles Bukowski with a naked Mexican whore, dancing around on this broken wood floor.”

Barr is, like most singer-songwriters, a walking contradiction. A man who, through his music—an amalgam of suicide ballads and rock-bottom blues, historical roots and a Vonnegutian disregard for the space-time continuum—seeks to strike the balance between nihilism and optimism. It’s a balance that Barr and his band, the Slow Drags, effectively manage on All the Great Aviators Agree, the decidedly upbeat follow-up to Legionnaires’ Disease. “There are a bunch of gray areas,” says Barr, pulling a strand of dark hair from his eyes. “Fatalism and hope aren’t as polarized as we think.”

If Barr, who arrived in Portland in ’92, has come unstuck, the same can be said for Aviators. The Drags (who discreetly claim an average age of 31) mine roots music, mutating centuries of tradition with a modern sensibility much like the Band did—with a gravelly voiced singer and an ear for imagery. It’s a heaping mound of Americana—tied together by a warts-and-all earnestness and Barr’s knack for detail: “With every single line, I can place myself,” he says. “The person who belongs to that line, or a place I was...walking through Santa Cruz, the Old Crow bars and railroad cars.”

Musically, Barr says, “We’re as big of Johnny Cash fans as we are Flaming Lips fans,” a claim that’s appararent in the band’s Zombies-meet-Merle Haggard sound. He goes on, excitedly talking about the new album—its long tracks and orchestration. But Aviators’ songs are fairly short, without orchestral swells. Barr, whose voice recalls Mike Ness or Eric Bachmann, stops mid-sentence and smiles: He’s not talking about Aviators. He’s talking about We Will Be Forgotten, a “big-picture” album scheduled for late fall release.

But Aviators’ release party isn’t until Friday. “Things just kept piling up and we were like, ‘Fuck it, let’s put out an album,’” he explains. Scotland Barr has come unstuck in time. He keeps moving forward while grounding himself in the moment—be that moment past, present or future. Usually all three at once.