Talk Vinyl With Me: Paul Baribeau - self-titled LP

Cross-posted from https://chrisfromyearbookrecords.substack.com

I can’t remember exactly where my foot-in-the-door with folk-punk and adjacent artists began, but I’d suspect it started with my obsession over the Mountain Goats and Against Me!. Neither of them are objectively folk-punk (though each have earlier material that can be considered as such) but both of them are easy entrypoints by association into the folk-punk rabbit hole, and both of them have tangential connections to the now-defunct Plan-It-X Records.

Discovering the Plan-It-X Records discography and going to a couple of the PIX Fest shows was like sitting down at a buffet, after having already eaten dinner. There was so much - TOO MUCH - to absorb, so many amazing artists who I’d never heard of, and they were all absolutely killing it. I don’t even know if I ever got past the tip of the iceberg in trying to properly appreciate every band that was born out of or associated with that scene. I envied a friend of mine who was living in Bloomington, Indiana at the time - where the label was based - because it felt like the epicenter of something that I wanted so desperately to be part of.

All of that could easily segue into a whole separate - and very complex - article, but I’m specifically mentioning it here because PIX released Paul Baribeau’s self-titled 2005 album on CD. It would later be reissued on vinyl through No Idea Records, and self-released on cassette (I can already see this article series doing significant damage to my Discogs wantlist as I come across formats and variants that I didn’t realize existed, sigh).

While Grand Ledge was the album from Baribeau that really resonated with me, the self-titled album is still an absolute raw powerhouse of emotion, and the type of songwriting that seems so simplistic, unless you actually sit down to try to replicate it. It’s fourteen short songs with honest lyrics - some of which seem like improvised stream-of-consciousness - delivered with a heart-on-sleeve level of earnestness that few other artists are able to match.

The album is bookended by two tracks that are mostly just vocal - “Things I Don’t Do” is completely a capella, while “Tablecloth” is accompanied only with a repeating knock on a guitar to keep the beat. Sandwiched between those two songs, Baribeau leans more folk than punk, but his voice maintains just enough of a gravelly kick to give it an edge to it all, even when delivering cutesy lyrics like this, from “Strawberry”:

“To say that you are pretty would be like saying that the ocean is blue. Because the ocean is filled with all kinds of colors, and I see all kinds of things when I look at you.”

My personal favorite track is the particularly devastating “Never Get To Know”, which touches both on the fragility of the lives of the people around us and the frustration in dealing with their flaws. While Baribeau ends the song singing that he feels let down by the people who have died around him through his life, he also simultaneously admits that it’s coming from a place of fear and anger - something that probably strikes a chord with anyone who has had to deal with loss. He ends the song by saying, “I will not let down the people who love me” - a PMA way of reminding us all that we should be always striving to do better in our lives, for ourselves and for each other.

Album highlights: “Never Get To Know”, “Boys Like Me”, “Strawberry”

The record nerd stuff: My copy is the 2024 reissue. This filled a hole in my collection when it was reissued, because despite the fact that there were several different pressings between 2013-2014, it was still pretty scarce and I never picked up a copy. While I’m not usually an original pressing purist, I am admittedly a sucker for limited edition or colored vinyl variants. I would like to eventually replace this with one of the older colored vinyl pressings. I had older pressings of both this and Grand Ledge and regrettably sold them along the way. I’ve got a 2010 pressing of Unbearable on black, but would also maybe like to pick up one of the colored vinyl pressings of that also.

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