Barr Brothers slip into something more relatable

Coming up in a cult band can sometimes cast a curse over everything a musician does afterwards, but Brad and Andrew Barr seem to have successfully given their shared past as two-thirds of The Slip the, ahem, slip since shifting their energies towards the Barr Brothers a few years ago.

Indeed, it’s probably safe to say that the Barr Brothers, after just two acclaimed albums — 2011’s indie sleeper hit The Barr Brothers and last year’s reputation-solidifying Sleeping Operator — already command a substantially larger following than the Slip’s jazzbo improv-rock freakery managed to muster over 16 years and eight records.

“I feel like we got a real second chance,” observes Andrew, who drums behind frontman/guitarist Brad and classically trained harpist Sarah Pagé in the Barrs. “I really feel lucky in that regard because it was a total reset. It feels about as much a total reset as getting divorced and then remarrying and feeling like, ‘Wow, this actually works and this feels good and it feels as good as the other thing did.’ And I feel really lucky about that.

“You’ve just gotta move to a different country and carry around a giant harp.”

The Barrs’ relocation from Boston to Montreal — after Andrew fell for a Canadian — in 2011 has definitely been a boon to their career, in more ways than one.

For one thing, it introduced them to the Barr Brothers’ secret weapon, Pagé, whom Andrew used to hear practising her harp through the walls of his adjacent apartment when he first moved north. But the pair were also welcomed so warmly into Montreal’s open-eared underground musical community — members of the Arcade Fire, the Luyas, the Patrick Watson band and Thus Owls have joined them onstage and in studio over the years, while the band currently calls tastemaking Montreal label Secret City Records home — that the city immediately felt like a natural home.

It helps, too, that the Barrs no longer flaunt their eccentricities quite as much as they did in the Slip, opting instead these days to subtly integrate them into warmly wafting, occasionally Afro-tingedfolk(ish)-pop that’s classicist enough not to alienate the Boomer moms and dads into Paul Simon or Tom Petty who might chance across it. It’s all over the place, but seamlessly so.

“That’s where we come from. We come from the Kinks and Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones and the Velvet Underground,” says Andrew. “We’re just constantly searching, man. Almost anything Brad and I have ever done has been hard to categorize, and that’s been a difficult hurdle to get over. You know, you meet some stranger on the street and they’re, like: ‘Oh, you’re a musician! What kind of music do you play?’ All of a sudden, it’s like we become paralyzed by the question and it takes, like, 10 minutes to answer.”

Whatever you want to call the music, it’s finding an audience. The Barrs — who dropped by the Toronto Star studio Wednesday to play a few tunes — come through Toronto to play Lee’s Palace Thursday on their way to duke it out with Bahamas, Jenn Grant, Jeremy Fisher and Leonard Cohen for an Adult Alternative Album of the Year Juno Award in Hamilton this weekend, so the mainstream is starting to pay attention.

Bigger stages beckon, which is one of the reasons the band decided to “widen out” its sound a bit on Sleeping Operator. Andrew jokes that they all grew tired of watching festival crowds try to figure out if they were actually playing or “just tuning up” whilst on tour for the first record.

“We played this thing on CHOM-FM the other night, which is a big rock station in Montreal, and before we went on they were playing, I don’t know, Nine Inch Nails and Pink Floyd,” he says. “I love that we fit into this somehow in somebody’s mind. It’s great. The whole music world is becoming more eclectic, I think, in how it categorizes itself.”