Chris Brokaw & Geoff Farina

Event information

It is an absolute pleasure to be bringing one of my favourite songwriters of all time to the Barrels Alehouse. Geoff Farina was guitarist and vocalist in Karate, a heavily influential three-piece jazz-rock band signed to Southern Records from the mid 90’s until Geoff’s hearing problems brought Karate to an end in 2005. Farina’s charismatic voice, and versatile guitar playing are also heard on a number of excellent solo albums, a...nd as one-half of Secret Stars, the seminal early-90s duo that passed around home-made cassettes of songs now covered by the likes of Ida and Death Cab for Cutie

Chris Brokaw, who has had equal success in his own right, will join him on stage. As a founding member of Codiene (Sub Pop label mates of Nirvana in the late 80’s) he helped kick start the slowcore scene in the US at that time and later went on to form Come with Thalia Zedek.

Together they bring their dry and smokey, low-key singing, and their clear-as-a-bell virtuoso guitar playing to a series of North American, pre-WWII classics. Taken from the blues, folk and ragtime repertoire, most of these songs will be known to anyone with an interest in American music. But its unlikely that anyone has heard them played like this for many years – clean and clear, spared of all hokey folkiness, and with a handful of fresh details that really allow them to breathe again, as if they’d only been written yesterday. Farina’s jazzy, European inflected acoustic flourishes, and Brokaw’s dusty country finger-picking are a perfect compliment to one another, and ‘The Angel’s Message To Me’ is a soothing tonic: a collection of songs written in one economic recession, then beautifully resurrected and updated.

These songs will provide solace to troubled times and minds all over again.