Elle Barbara - Word on the Street
Perennial, Celluloid Lunch, and House of Barbara
Released on June 27th, 2025
Elle Barbara’s Word On The Street is as much a personal expression as it is social commentary, prompting the listener to examine their relationship to art, their inner workings, and the outside world.
I was sold on the album concept upon first glance. The genre-blending Word On The Street is situated within anti-consumerism and AI resistance. With references as far ranging as alien life, industrial food systems, and hockey, this project brings myth, local patriotism, and the social systems that define our realities into dialogue with personal evolution. Persisting through systemic pressures to be silenced, Barbara presents her latest album, “a brazen testament to how a low-income, welfare-assisted, middle-aged, Black male-female transsexual beat the odds”.
Calling out the thin veil of niceties that politicians promise to their “Facebook friends”, “Hitler, Satan, & Associates” points to the use of social media for mass surveillance. The march of “Before and After” calls up Gustov Holt’s “Mars” from The Planets and John’s Williams’ “The Imperial March” from Star Wars. It’s layered with ambient synths, whimsical flute, and storytelling that pulls it into the realm of musical theatre, but doesn’t linger! Songs like “Before and After” evolve (or dissolve) into a cosmic soundscape, with underwater drums, mellotron strings, spaceship-like synths, and mournful vocals, before bringing the mood back up on songs like “Word on the Rink”. Barbara manages to make songs like “BBQ” simultaneously celebratory and sinister, deviating from chordal indicators towards resolution and sprinkling in crisp keys that oscillate between high and bright to dark and descending, throwing in a hysterical laugh in a nod to the absurd.
Heavily Inspired by the work of André Serouille, whose art is worked into the architecture of Montreal, and engineered by Rennt Wilson at Value Sound, Barbara’s compositions expertly blend genre elements from alternative, glam, devotional, and soul. Word On The Street is also time-bending, evoking multiple eras with synths, drum machines, and dramatic key changes. It is bravely on the nose of this current moment in human history, and a triumph of independent artistry.