Laura Barrett

Laura Barrett is that quirky, crafty, half-hip/half-nerdy friend who miraculously managed to escape puberty with her imagination fully intact and who never ceases to charm you with her wiles and whimsy. Like one Joanna Newsom, she's embraced an atypical instrument (the kalimba), she has a serious childlike streak, and her songs have a certain emotional swoop to them that belie their innocent qualities. Yet unlike Newsom, whose ambitious compositions have found a comfortable home in orchestra halls by now, Barrett's tunes seem custom made for house shows and gatherings of friends. They didn't mingle so well with the strangers packed in at Emo's Jr., but then again, who or what does mingle well on a Wednesday just after noon? - Pitchfork.com

New Music: Laura Barrett: "Deception Island Optimists Club" [MP3/Stream]

The kalimba, colloquially known as the thumb piano, is an instrument of sublime simplicity: The water-drop reverberations of plucked reeds or metal tines are amplified by a resonator box fashioned from humble wood or a hollow gourd. Classically trained pianist Laura Barrett plies her trade in miniature on "Deception Island Optimists Club", a kalimba-carried ballad where she makes the most of the instrument's rich, pure tones, and stands to do for the indie world's perception of the thumb piano what Joanna Newsom did for the harp (although her singing is more akin to Cat Power's retiring soul than Newsom's brassy world-jazz). If this were written for piano or guitar, it would simply be a forlorn dove of a song with a trembling, flighty melody-- nice if unexceptional. But the sprightly clockwork of Barrett's kalimba phrases, lurching forward and falling back with the organic melody, creates a more rarified and captivating atmosphere. - Pitchfork.com

"Barrett's arrangements are fascinating, an otherwordly glimmering mass of delicate folk, minor-key waltzes and dissonant polyrhythms[.]"
- NOW magazine

"Unassuming she may be, but forgettable she is not. Her candid warmth and smart, funny lyrics coaxed many a giggle from the audience members, who took in her performance in pin drop silence. With more shows like this, she may not be Toronto's secret for much longer." - chartattack.com (online version of Chart magazine)

"Is "Robot Ponies" a novelty song? Only in the sense that it’s funny. Novelty songs are supposed to deliver their punch with funny words and funny voices; you laugh the first time, and then you play them for somebody else. But "Robot Ponies" is the rare kind of joke that gets funnier and deeper with repeated listenings. It’s a joke about desire and obsolescence, consumerism and power dynamics, technology and artificiality, the way that childhood wishes are inconveniently similar to adult longings for affection without obligations.

Part of what makes it hold up when it’s not novel anymore is that it’s a ravishing little piece of music—the kalimba line that underscores the whole song is too sturdily airy to suggest a novelty. It’s not just the plinky tone of Barrett’s kalimba that makes it sound like a music box or some other kind of mechanical marvel, it’s the comfortable roll of sixteenth notes that goes on for the entire song. And the first part that sticks in the memory isn’t the lyrics (aside from the most perfectly pitched vulgarity in living memory, on which the meaning of the whole thing pivots a little), but Barrett’s melody, whose slow minor-key arc and affectless delivery give the song a hint of someone trying not to hope too hard for what she knows she wants.

The original version of "Robot Ponies" appears on Barrett’s self-released Earth Sciences EP, and there are a couple of other versions floating around as MP3s: a performance from Brave New Waves on CBC Radio, and a live version on which she’s backed up by Owen Pallett from Final Fantasy." - Douglas Wolk, for paperthinwalls.com

"[...]Pallett has shared stages with one of my proudest discoveries of the year, Toronto's Laura Barrett, whose Christmas-themed Robot Ponies got the nod from critic Douglas Wolk this week in the PaperThinWalls.com year-end wrap-up. Barrett plays the kalimba (African thumb piano) and, like Pallett, writes impossibly imaginative songs informed by the sensibilities of video games and instant messaging, and she will break your heart." - slate.com