Twee Is Not a Four-Letter Word

On first listen, one might mistake the Pica Beats as just another of
Seattle’s current crop of rootsy, trad-folk
revivalists. Singer
and songwriter Ryan Barrett grew up in Vermont working summers on an
organic farm; the band’s songs are mostly acoustic, frequently accented
with subdued vocal harmonies and seemingly rustic instrumentation; and
their sophomore release and first for Sub Pop imprint Hardly Art
(themselves no strangers to the folkies), Beating Back the Claws of
the Cold, has its share of pastoral or old-timey imagery.

But what separates the Pica Beats from these bearded would-be
mountain men and rural hollerers is a certain twee quality—listen
closely, and it’s clear that Barrett and his band are as much
Slumberland as they are back-to-the-land.

Strictly speaking, twee is an insult. Merriam-
Webster’s derives
the word from British baby talk for “sweet” and defines it as
“affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint.” In the
’80s, however, an international underground of bands, labels, music
journalists, college-radio DJs, and fans conspired to scrub the word of
its negative connotations and reclaim it as a banner of indie pop.

The Pica Beats’ arrangements have the kind of endearingly shambolic
quality—these are home recordings that want to sound like
home recordings—typical of twee pop, making up what they lack in
studio polish with a toy chest full of odd instruments (or their
synthesized equivalents) and a judicious use of coy male/female vocal
interplay (à la Belle and Sebastian or Architecture in
Helsinki).

If their recordings sound like a handful of orchestra geeks left
unsupervised in the band room, their songs read like the work of a
library shut-in. The band’s press sheet describes Barrett as a
“hyper-
literate” songwriter; music blog The Catbirdseat predicted
that, “lazy writers writing about the Pica Beats will probably use the
words ‘Neutral Milk Hotel’ or ‘Decemberists'” (this is a fun little
dodge—a way to bring up these very comparisons while preemptively
calling out others who might do the same).

Barrett does write fanciful nonlinear narratives full of sepia-toned
photographic details. “Hope, Was Not a Smith Family Tradition,” whose
opening lines are both maudlin lament and rim-shot-worthy punch line
(“Hope was not a Smith family tradition/Neither was coming home sober
with your paycheck intact”), tells the tale of a downtrodden everyman
family. “Shallow Dive” recalls an “orphan suicide” in grim detail.
“Cognac & Rum” is a kind of sideways sea chantey.

He also deploys the kind of precious references that are liable to
land a band on Stuff White People Like. Pica, for one thing, is a rare
disorder in which people eat hard-to-swallow stuff like dirt, rocks, or
nails. Elsewhere on the album, Barrett drops the following antiques and
triple-word scores: hikikomori (a Japanese phenomenon of extreme
social isolation), Ponzi schemes, Bakelite, paper dolls, colonies,
golems, princes, kings, queens, tetanus, lockjaw, an orphan girl
hanging herself by piano wire, and a whole pantheon of Egyptian
deities.

“I tend to write the lyrics to a song in one burst, really fast,”
Barrett says. “That way I self-censor less, and I think what comes out
is more honest. After I finish, I try not to analyze what I’ve
written.”

Which is hard to believe, as his lyrics reveal a mind deeply
interested the art of songcraft and perhaps even the criticism thereof.
On “Summer Cutting Kale,” the titular verse reads like a critique of an
earlier draft: “How failed was that verse that never nailed/The
overcast and the summer cutting kale.” On “Shrinking Violets,” Barrett
sings, “So you got the courage now/To write a love song without one
metaphor.” Funny, because through Beating Back the Claws of the
Cold Barrett displays a gift for resonant if intentionally
enigmatic metaphors. “Shrinking Violets” follows the previous verse
with “It’s a power drill/It’s a carbide cone with a sharpened edge/And
an electrical cord”; the melancholy Egyptology of “Poor Old Ra” gives
way to the song’s driving, aerial refrain, sung in male/female rounds
by Barrett and guest vocalist and oboist Ashlee Hunter: “I am the
tension/You are the tightrope.”

“When I was younger, I wanted to write the most complex songs with
the most complex lyrics,” Barrett recalls. “And it was a train wreck.
I’d write so many lyrics in a song that I couldn’t actually sing them
and get them all out. So I’ve gradually been reining that in, but I
still like wordplay and things that are difficult to pronounce
correctly. I think I’ve gotten to a good balance of catchy melody and
lyrical complexity.”

Barrett began writing songs as the Pica Beats in 2005 while still
living in Vermont. In 2007, he moved to Seattle and released the
essentially solo debut album All Mysteries Solve Themselves.
Later that year, a full band began to crystallize with the addition of
drummer Colin English (formerly of synth-wavers Infomatik).

“I’d show him a new song, he’d record drums, and then I’d do most of
the instrumentation and backing tracks,” Barrett says. “If I needed
horns, I’d call a friend. There are a whole lot of people on
there.”

Beating Back the Claws of the Cold is full of bedroom-sized
symphonies, with Barrett’s singing and guitar surrounded by scrappy
percussion, piano, bowed bass, synthesized strings and horns, oboe, and
even sitar (the band is currently looking to add a marimba to their
live show). But at the center of this collaborative recording process
are Barrett’s singular songs, which strike a tightrope walker’s balance
between labyrinthine lyrics and maddeningly unforgettable melodies.
There are too many great moments on the album to unpack
here—pretty much every song has at least one skin-tingling turn.
As its name suggests and its overriding tone confirms, this is a
perfect autumn album, bleak but hopefully huddled against the
chill—”Summer Cutting Kale” seems to long for both some lost
idyllic life and merely mourn the passing of the season (“gotta reach
her with the green and gold that’s been sold downriver”); the
outstanding “Poor Old Ra” is an elegy for the sun god (“Atet sunk down
somewhere off the coast of New Brunswick or the arctic/Sektet sunk with
Horus stoned at the wheel/With every oil slick and passing barge, the
chances that you are goes down”).

Since the album’s recording, Barrett has recruited more members
through classifieds and friends of friends, filling out the band’s
lineup with keyboardist-bassist (and Hollow Earth Radio cofounder)
Garrett Kelly, Adam McCollom (who joined just in time to add keyboard
tracks to otherwise-finished songs), backup vocalist/percussionist
Alice Sandahl (who joined just weeks ago). Barrett describes the lineup
as, “for the time being, very solid.”

At a recent in-store performance at the Ballard Sonic Boom, the band
seemed plenty solid, if maybe a little mismatched. Barrett, Kelly, and
English are either scruffy/Northwest or nerdy/indie types, wearing
beanies and horn-rimmed glasses and secondhand slacks; McCollom and
Sandahl are more conventionally striking stage presences, looking like
professional indie rockers, sharply dressed and with stylish haircuts.
The latter flanking the former on the small, crowded stage made for a
stark contrast. Sandahl’s voice, too, was brighter and more confident
than the album’s female vocals (sung by Ashlee Hunter and Christina
Antipa), with none of their wispiness or affectedly feeble
quavering.

But Barrett remains perfectly, nonpejoratively twee (“dainty,
delicate, cute, or quaint”). He was soft-spoken, even in front of the
small crowd, mumbling and trailing off in his
between-song banter.
When the band launched into their first song, the assembled instruments
initially drowned out his singing; the sound guy had to rush to the
mixer to turn him up.