Barn Owl's penchant for subdued guitar music has always been a reliable standard for me. Lost In The Glare and Ancestral Star were easy to dissect, but welcoming and pleasantly sparse with a primal aesthetic that worked as an easy entry point into drone. In contrast, V is a totally different creation. Drawing inspiration from dub and dark ambient music, V is a fresh achievement for Jon Porras and Evan Caminiti, shifting tone artfully and refining their style. It superbly bridges a gap between two common but oddly disconnected subgroups of music.
The album opens with "Void Redux," one minor miracle among several in the album. By using the kind of funereal ambiance in conjunction with their own brand of haunted drone, it immediately made it clear that this was a new kind of Barn Owl. If past albums were like surveying a desert landscape and coming across an ancient pyramid, V is the moment they actually enter the tomb. "The Long Shadow" borrows influence from shoegaze and pours drapes of noise over a guitar melody that in the past would probably be left to linger. Similarly, in "Blood Echo," I can hear guitar notes but never clearly; they're wrestling with layers of synth and warped percussion and failing slowly, being constantly consumed by some bigger and more menacing source. "The Opulent Decline," the album's seventeen minute grand finale, is practically an interring of Barn Owl's own style, serving as a fantastic corrosion of noise and harmony that caterwauls along, never quite peaking and never really slowing down. Each song is driven by that same restlessness, begging for replay once its brief time is up.
It is important to note that this is still very much a Barn Owl album and most people who are not well-acquainted with the group probably won't view these changes as dramatically as I have described them. There is a clear augmenting of their core sound with different timbres (synthesizers) and the slightest touches of dub techno and sampled percussion. Apart from that, it's still a duo making mournful guitar drone at heart. But to keep an aesthetic in check while reconstructing how to use the instruments they have takes a lot of skill. To do it so comprehensively is what makes this such a pleasant surprise.
Barn Owl albums have, in the past, always struck me as partially mired in some ideas that never quite clicked. That's not to say I don't love their past work, but I always got an odd sense of asymmetry about it. From guitar effects to the eastern-influenced sonics on each piece, it was all very isolated. Whether that was an intentional experience or a form that the group fell into, I can't say; part of me feels that drone with a heavy emphasis on guitar always engenders a theme of "loneliness." But V captures that feeling wholly, and adds a few details that fill gaps I didn't think to acknowledge. The result is something greater than the sum of its parts.
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