With the allure of a Hollywood actor of the past, and the name of an infamous 30’s era gangster,
Edward Barrow (his real name, from his father’s English ancestry) is a Parisian singer-songwriter who enchants with his layered melodic pop. His delicately feminine and even voluptuous voice is accompanied by subtile harmonies and evolved instrumentations, sometimes hypnotic, always dreamlike.
Edward Barrow begins his album The Black Tree at the piano, leading us onto his road. Nostalgia will join us as we cross his melancholy ocean where the sea meets the infinite points of the earth that touch a celestial vault of light from his past. Because within Edward Barrow’s music is a vagabond soul that travels through his memories and flirts with reminiscence. Edward Barrow’s teasingly gloomy melodies possess the art of exquisite invocation, revealing itself bit by bit, without ever giving it all up, not unlike an impressionist painter.
His childhood was underscored with Marianne Faithfull’s album ‘Broken English’, bringing him back from his own hellish descent with her eminently harrowing ballads or Simon and Garfunkel’s album ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’. Edward Barrow’s place is with the musicians of emotion, of intimacy - an Elvis inflection, a little Chris Isaak, or some late Johnny Cash, at the end of his days – with the dark singers, who evoke Nick Cave or Andrew Bird, and a vocal chorus that is even closer to those of Antony and the Johnsons.
Again with the piano, Edward takes us back to his inland sea (My Sea, Back To The Road) and then with the autoharp, he leads us through the garden to the dead forest where we meet the sleeping lover who only smiles under the eyes of those who love him (The Black Tree). Sometimes it’s as if we’re on the old American far west, where the lonely hero returns to his inner ‘home,’ his only paradise, seemingly lost but found again thanks to the memories awakened by a new love’s magic (Blue Eyed Man, Every Day Spent Together...). Magic that also materialises through ominous chords that nevertheless illuminate the road between shooting stars (I See You When He Smiles, Nothing In My Belly). And then we dive into the heart of a reinvented coldwave to find the first tracks of a radiant future (Two Little Birds, part I).
Ultimately, Edward Barrow is a romantic knight who sports the symbolic Columbine flower upon his lapel with pride, oscillating between somber introspection with ‘Nothing In My Belly’ to an almost vengeful passionate exaltation in ‘Life Is Beautiful’ where life is magnificent even just laying on a beach, watching the sky...
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