Pitchfork

A solid traditionalist, Currituck Co.'s Kevin Barker doesn't shy away from paying homage to precursors. On his second proper full-length, Ghost Man on First, he combines Nina Simone's "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair" and "Waring Cuney" into "A Raga Called Nina", offers name-checking props to 60s folkie Fred Neil and bluegrass killer John Fahey, and covers Bert Jansch's "Silly Woman", a track from the 1971 album Rosemary Lane.

Barker borrows his project's name from a county in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, but resides in Brooklyn. Firmly lodged within the Big Apple's out-folk context, the urban hillbilly released his 2002 debut, Unpacking My Library, on Mark Robinson's TeenBeat label, and also plays lead guitar for Aden. From this indie rock vantage point, he could very well find contextual links to Tower Recordings offshoots Matt Valentine & P.G. Six, as well as kindred, but less topically similar spirits Animal Collective and Devendra Banhart. To avoid petty regionalism, you could draw a family tree with Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny as well as Espers' Greg Weeks.

Of those players, his practice most faithfully corresponds to the beautifully faded standards he admires. As those who saw Gus Van Sant's updated Psycho know, this has its positives and negatives. Though not opposed to experimentation-- he does sometimes tease out or expand upon particularly sumptuous threads of an iconic players' work-- he remains within his forebears' shadows, for the most part.

There's no doubting that Barker's one heck of guitarist, but a number of these compositions, as prettily intricate as they are, come off like guitar exercises rather than compelling pieces. Cheekily, he offers a service through his website for eager beavers who want to learn how to play Currituck Co. songs via instructional videos and tablature. Folks choose the songs ("choose any four songs and the fifth song's free!") and he passes along the goods. Ripe for this by-the-books treatment, "Requiem for John Fahey" and "Dedication: Fred Neil" are solo guitar pieces that sound out the smooth finger-pickers they reference. Similarly structured, "The Tropics of Cancer" brings to mind the warmth of the geographical grid rather than the chaotic hedonism in the texts of Henry Miller.

Despite his skills, though, I'm more a fan of the moments in which he opts to screw with expectations. For instance, the crackling Eastern-flavored "Raga Called Pat Cohn" unrolls over nine minutes with patient guitar plucks, flutters, and equally rarified harmonium. The repetitions are catchy on their own, but he adds a subdued vocal drone that eventually turns into actual language just as the harmonium takes on the crisply breezy properties of a muffled flute. Not as digressive as Henry Flynt or as noisome as Sunburned Hand of The Man, the work still manages to wander admirably.

More compactly stated, the cover of Jansch's "Silly Woman" shares likeness with the original, but lulls in the vein of Six Organs of Admittance's Compathia. Of the eight works, the biggest anomaly is the metallic "The March of the People Who Do Not Know You", a full-frontal distorto guitar jam that shows up unexpectedly just prior to the heart-achy closer, "I Truly Understand". It's far from riveting, but the yammering guitar shield disrupts the folkie atmosphere in an interesting way, and points towards the different avenues Barker has at least tangentially explored more fully on other releases.

Currently, Barker's working on Garden of the Deadroom, which has a tentative winter release date on Troubleman Unlimited. Quite obsessively, he's been honing the album since August 2002. Of course, time doesn't necessarily equal quality, but it'll nonetheless be exciting to see how much weirdness he allows to creep in to thwart the conceptual purity of the finished product.