I don't love Annwn, Mick Barr's 79-minute-and-41-second guitar wall of extreme theme-and-variation, melody-and-texture stratification. But I do respect its seven unflinching, unapologetic seven-to-15-minute guitar monoliths, not to mention Barr's technical ability and his sense for compounded sounds. This isn't strict minimalism, but it carries that sense of devotion to sound and idea, to chasing a notion from one end of an album to another. Barr's piercing multi-tracked electric guitars build deep beds at the base. On "Part 1", he sporadically stops his static sound to unload a thin riff, which gets longer each time he plays it. Before the 13 minutes of "Part 1" expire, he's playing over the static, augmenting it and bending it from above. Barr is a composer in search of a single epic and a guitarist in search of a million thrills, and here he proves he's got the tools and the mindset to procure both.

But Annwn is a little unkind to most every audience, save perhaps the most attentive. It's more of a workshop than an album, really. Casual listeners will get lost in Barr's long-form excursions after 90 seconds. If you're willing to hang on Barr's every riff and layer time and again, Annwn is full of rewards. The record is at its most effective when it is rapid on top and glacial beneath, as during the midsection of 15-minute "Part 2". Barr moves between small intervals in slow, jolting steps, and each drop or lift feels like a revelation, even though he's shredding above the stasis with thin, high, impatient lances. The effect is one of simultaneous and alternate allusions-- of sprinting but getting nowhere, of crawling but watching mileposts click past. Whenever Barr creates conflicts and resolves them while baiting the listener with serpentine riffs, Annwn is exhilarating. On "Part 4", for instance, he lets riffs whiz by one another, tugging attention in multiple directions, only to circle the wagons with harmonies you never saw coming. It's composition disguised as chaos, more meticulous than masturbatory.

As another symptom of Annwn's workshop feel, Barr saves the most triumphant and accessible illustration for "Part 7", the last and shortest thing here: It's an anthem from the start, several circular parts interconnecting with one another, rising and falling constantly. By track's end, there's a viscous sound at the bottom, but one guitar crests its breakers like a champion. Suddenly, a record that's felt mostly like an inhuman exercise climaxes like a victory march.