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Barbarism

by Katie Alice Greer

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1.
Fits/My Love Can’t Be There’s been a lot of talk about what happens when we sleep On the job like the night watch In a heist movie We let them in, didn’t we? My love can’t be asked to dance, no Feet in the street unseen by surveillance Now I’m an undertaker and I never wanted to be There’s room at the top, they said The surveillance industry is a Spectator sport with career reward A spectator sport and more popcorn when you’re bored We want no observations We want no questions please See something? Say nothing Unless it’s to the police My love can’t be asked to dance, no Feet in the street unseen by surveillance When I hear people in the street I know they’re just like me Searching for the universe in strange words a stranger speaks I need a reason to sing I need to wait in the wings, you said But tell me, aren’t we The ones that we were waiting for us to be? For us to be For us to be My love can’t be asked to dance, no Feet in the street unseen by surveillance Feet in the street Feet in the street Feet in the street
2.
3.
4.
Dreamt I Talk To Horses I have a right to know I’m not coming out guns akimbo I’m not asking for world war four Number three, listen please, it’s taken all but the last bit out of me Say stay, sugar, say stay, sugar I’m not as sturdy as you think I am, you know You throw punches like you think there’s metal in my bones Spent three straight weeks in my dreams I said please I can’t keep waking up alone And you know me And how much I like waking up alone Are you just made up? I don’t know You keep yourself locked up it shows And like a cancer it’ll grow Tumor’s coming out now If you let your guard down Say stay, sugar, say stay, sugar I told you how my friend got stoned and time traveled ahead In the future there will be no more grievances between the two popes Are you just made up? I don’t know You keep yourself locked up it shows And like a cancer it’ll grow Tumor’s coming out now If you let your guard down Say stay, sugar, say stay, sugar Say stay, sugar say it If you don’t want me to go If you really want me Sugar then just say so
5.
6.
Flag Wave pt 2 Things were getting heavy An ennui was setting in Oh, I know I know I know You don’t wanna be bossed around and I don’t blame you There’s something inside of me That won’t let me be I’ve got to go Somewhere I can fully roam These pastures for you are not for me You don’t wanna be bossed around and I don’t blame you
7.
A mystery To be Unraveling A spool of thread like Hair on your head But from inside instead Captivated How much do you want me to see? For how much will I have capacity? Captivated Fascinated Do you mean to be The treasure that you seem? Or is this only existing in my cross hairs In the scope through which I’m Seeing Captivated Fascinated
8.
No Man 05:34
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Barbarism 02:35

about

"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

credits

released June 24, 2022

Written performed produced & mixed by Katie Alice Greer
Mastered by Matt Colton
Photos by Kathryn Vetter Miller
Layout by Seth Brau
Spoken word excerpt from the poem "Porn" by Dorothea Lasky

P+C 2022 Under exclusive license to FourFour Records

Catalog # FFR-448

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Katie Alice Greer Los Angeles, California

"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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