If you could draw a line on the musical landscape between ’60s vibes and 90’s college rock, between gnarly guitars and heavenly harmonies, and between punk energies and Paisley Underground poise, and then travel to the point where all of those intersect, you would find the awesomely named Bummer, Dude! sat writing songs.
“Barefoot” is a strange, yet brilliantly, assemblage of music, a pile of contradictions that are creative, opposites that attract. I don’t know how they managed to weave such conflicting sonic forces together and come out with such a beautiful design.
But they do, and they do it like no other band I know. It’s like when you accidentally send two or three different tracks playing on your computer simultaneously, and as this new sound ebbs and flows, you get moments of strange harmony that sound like nothing you would have thought of doing. “Barefoot” sounds like that, only something purposefully and perfectly done.
Creating something new in music isn’t easy anymore; most things have been tried. But you can turn to the established sounds scattered across eras and genres, dismantle them, and then put them back together in new and interesting ways.
And that is what is happening here, and in a way that sounds better than any previous attempts at such sonic cross-pollination.
