Barnicle: Deviating From Deviance

By Martin Sattell

Photo by Lara Woolfson

It goes without saying that experiences during someone’s formative years have resounding effects on adult life. Certain imbalances in one’s environment commonly incite subconscious responses to external stimuli, and oftentimes these changes lay the foundations of adulthood. Given the sexually-focused music and feminist undercurrents of Brighton-based indie rockers Barnicle, it is only natural to attribute these traits to guitarist/vocalist/frontwoman Karen Barnicle’s four-year stint at a private women’s liberal arts college with an enrollment of just five hundred students.

Yet, because she’s just 23 years of age, it may be too early to blame Karen’s unbridled sexuality and pro-feminist energies to her time at Pine Manor College. Although it may be premature to psychoanalyze, it is undeniable that Karen’s musical drive accelerated during her college years. An individualist having played for a long time with another female-fronted group, she wanted to do her own thing. “Since I was 16 years old I had been in bands, but never as anything but the guitar player,” recalls Karen.

An extremely self-motivated songwriter, Karen supplemented her required college curricula with what she calls “songwriting homework assignments.” She wrote songs for friends and for crushes alike and compiled an extensive repertoire of original material. By the end of her undergrad experience, her catalog of upwards of fifty songs only made her dream of heading up her own outfit all the more realizable.

It wasn’t until she met Luke Garro (drummer of local rock luminary Piebald and future boyfriend), however, that her current project and namesake ‘Barnicle’ truly took form. She and Garro met through friends at a party, and the two began practicing together a few nights every week. “I would show him songs I’d written or email him demos I recorded while he was at work, and then we would get together and rock,” tells Karen.

At that time, Karen’s friends, Lauren DeVain and Jim Carroll, were filling in for bass and guitar, respectively. But upon seeing Rebekka Takamizu play for Eyes Like Knives, Karen resolved to commission her as a permanent fixture this past summer. The three played a show at the Middle East whereupon Kevin Rheault, their current bass player, asked to join as well. The four — Barnicle, Garro, Takamizu, and Rheault — are the current retainers of Barnicle’s nomenklatura.

In a scene infamous for musical incest, it is only natural that Barnicle’s members (save Karen) are somewhat distracted by other endeavors — both by other side-projects of their own and main groups. But instead of holding Barnicle back creatively, or compromising music making, Karen says that playing with musicians who concentrate their efforts on other ventures is somewhat of a boon for the creative process.

“Kevin puts all of his creativeness into The Station Life, and Rebekka co-fronts Eye Like Knives, so there isn’t a conflict of ideas,” she notes. Because they all have other projects, “playing together is just plain fun, not difficult; we can just play,” Karen explains. And, as if to assuage all fears, she adds, “I prefer working with people in other bands anyway because it demonstrates how dedicated they are to playing music.” Practices are scheduled late at night and performances are planned around the shows that each member plays with other bands so as not to interfere, not to compromise both Karen’s and Barnicle’s music-making sovereignty.

It doesn’t matter, then, if Karen’s band mates exhaust their creativity elsewhere because, when all is said and done, Barnicle truly is its founder’s artistic conduit. “I write all of the songs and demo them on my 4-track before I show the other kids, and then we all get together and play them,” she reveals. Rheault, Garro, and Takamizu only make minor changes, adding solos or suggesting bridges. The raw material for Barnicle’s songs is only slightly refined by the other members, but the finished product is undoubtedly Karen’s own creation; she’s the band’s frontwoman in the utmost sense.

Rheault and Takamizu are only recent acquisitions to the Barnicle line-up, and, in fact, don’t even appear on Barnicle’s December debut EP, Take Me to Your Room. Karen and Garro performed all songs on the extended player without their current band mates, except Rheault’s additional guitar on “Runnin Around.” The album was put out by “Bampf!” — Garro’s record label venture.

So when it came time to design a cover for Take Me to Your Room, it only seemed logical for Karen to be on it. “The songs, the lyrics, the music, the thoughts are all me so people who know me well can see that it just felt right to put me on the cover,” she explains.

Take Me to Your Room‘s front cover depicts the area just above Karen’s knees to just below her nipples. She wears nothing more than a pair of red undies. Her band’s name and the album’s title are emblazoned across her abdomen. The back depicts the same area in a dorsal view; this time the track titles are painted across Karen’s back. Karen reasons that, “since much of the song content is about relationships and partying and making out, we wanted the cover to be sexy in a unique way.”

Her appearance on the cover may seem de facto given Karen’s predominance in Barnicle’s creative process and innate individualist current, but her attire (or lack thereof) is a further expansion of this local personality. It acts as liaison between her obvious individualism and the striking feminist presence in both her music and her personal character.

Somewhat shy about pictures, Karen admits, “I’m personally afraid to go home for Christmas. I don’t know what I’ll tell them.” One ought not be fooled by her seemingly modest demeanor, however, as her songs are as provocative and as sensual as the cover to her debut EP.

As its title would suggest, Take Me to Your Room is about the essentiality of being in charge of one’s sexuality. Karen extrapolates that the album “is about being in control, about going after what you want, not being shy.” Throughout the entirety of the six-song extended player, Karen’s lyrics urge the need for a girl to take charge of her sexuality and at times work outside society’s commonly accepted gender norms and rules. “Women my age and younger may wait for guys to make all the moves, but that leaves us in a position of less power,” says Karen.

Her sexually-charged and self-conscious songs discuss the currently contested issues of body image and promiscuity that often afflict women in Karen’s age group. “I’m So Cool” is about the tendency for women to be insecure when a man shows interest in them, questioning “What do I have that / Makes me so damn hot / Was it my ass that made it give you a shot?” Sometimes, Karen’s verse is less introspective and more lascivious. The metaphor-heavy “Crash My Shore” has the band’s harmless-looking frontwoman crooning such implicit verse as, “If my body was the world, you would be the sea / And oh how wet my dreams would be / You are the water that fills me.”

As aforesaid, Karen and Garro are currently seeing each other romantically. As if songs like “Runnin Around,” (which is about being caught with an ex-boyfriend) aren’t enough to cause problems, being in a relationship with a bandmate is sure to create difficulties. “Being in a band is like being in a serious relationship and a business combined,” says Karen. “We have had times where I wasn’t sure it would work, but he really supports my ideas.”

Not surprisingly, she is weary about talking about their relationship, for she doesn’t want her band to be thought of as “Luke Garro’s girlfriend’s band” or least of all as nepotistic. To such accusations, Karen replies, “I don’t want to get thrown into that ... I hate it when people ask: ‘What’ll happen if you guys break up?’ ‘Will Luke be kicked out of the band?’ No. There are plenty of successful bands that have that vibe — The Moldy Peaches, The White Stripes.” Garro isn’t doing her any favors. The fact that the two weren’t dating when they first started playing together is proof enough that Barnicle was created on the merit of quality music alone.

While Karen’s songs call for a revolution of gender roles, urging women to replace their institutionalized femininity with a more organic one, she has bigger plans. She points out: “I hear guys say all the time that they can’t relate to female-fronted bands’ music” and has taken it upon herself to change male perceptions about female-fronted music. Citing music-related, male-dominated professions such as venue owners and DJs, she suggests that these men’s aversions to “girly” music do an immense disservice to female listeners. “Think about all those girls who have to listen to WBCN all day and don’t hear a woman’s voice unless there’s some sort of special programming,” defends Karen. In order to combat such inadvertent sexism on the airwaves and in the music scene, she has begun holding listening parties for area female musicians. In so doing, she hopes to create an environment of goodwill among Boston-area songstresses so that they may cooperate to reform the Boston music scene’s apparent chauvinisms.

A sexual idealist, individualist, and outspoken social activist through action and music, Karen is in a precarious position: for a musician with an actual message, criticism can be brutal for one who is relatively inexperienced as a frontwoman. “It feels really great to be able to say all of this because it almost takes something off my back, and at the same time it opens me up for criticism,” she says.

Karen should not worry, though. She was brave enough to have moved from the background of a band to the forefront, had the audacity to appear naked on Barnicle’s album cover, and has often addressed controversial issues of gender roles within her music and beyond. It would be surprising to see her beaten down by critics. Even if Barnicle’s music weren’t some of the best female-fronted indie-rock currently on the Boston scene, she would most likely be saved by her resilience.

www.myspace.com/barnicle