One especially evocative technique in the Forest Swords toolbox is the tight crop on an impassioned vocal sample. Barnes likes to pinpoint the most urgent moment in a singer’s performance, then sever it from its surrounding context: no intake of breath, no resolution, no language, just assonance. On “End,” a displaced voice duets with a dusty woodwind sample; it sounds desperate to be understood, but all the syllables pour out scrambled. This mutilated utterance is lonelier than silence. Someone’s out there, but you can’t understand them; there’s distance between you that can’t be closed.
In the sparse imagery that accompanies Barnes’ music, the symbol of the cage repeats. A 2010 Forest Swords single took the name “Rattling Cage,” while the cover of Bolted depicts a gray humanoid figure trapped inside a rusty cube of wire. On the single “Caged,” which drones in just before Bolted’s halfway mark, a swirling, plaintive vocal sample echoes out into beatless silence—one of those Forest Swords silences that feels planetary in scale. The voice begins to stutter. A single utterance loops, the sharpness of the edit taking on its own percussive quality. And then the actual beat bears down like the hoofbeats of something massive, threatening to pummel the wisps of voice beneath it.
When you look closely at Bolted’s cover, you see that the cage and the body inside it are the same color. You see that inside the metal mesh, something like cobwebs strangles the human form. On the record, voices jolt and quake, their edges hard; the beat clamps down. Maybe this cage is not exactly a cage; maybe it runs all the way down to the bone.
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