Barely Real

A mini album with all the heavyweight significance of an album, Barely Real is a record of two sides. The first three songs grab hold of what made Barely Real’s precursor, Frigid Stars, so compelling, and streamlined what that album made possible; slowness, mantric precision, wide-open dynamics, hymnal reverence. Flip the record and Codeine’s music opens further, in surprising ways: one of their starkest, most unrelenting songs, “Hard To Find,” with a melody as simple and gentle as a nursery rhyme; guest David Grubbs’s piano performance on “W.,” an elliptical prefiguring of the Codeine song “Wird”; a cover of MX-80 Sound’s “Promise Of Love” which takes the Bloomington, Indiana band’s already-skeletal melodies and strips them back further. Beautifully empty.