For so long as homosexual bars have existed in New York, they’ve lived underneath menace of extinction. The police brutality of the Stonewall period led to the spiritual proper moralizing of the Reagan ascent, then the mass loss of life and social ostracization of the AIDS disaster. Within the present decade, iconic areas like Remedy and Henrietta Hudson have both shuttered or needed to resort to GoFundMe to outlive the pandemic. Those who endure usually are not simply ingesting institutions however essential lifelines for queer neighborhood and activism.
Macri Park could not carry the historic weight of the Stonewall Inn, however for a more moderen era of queer Brooklynites, its barstools and drag nights really feel like dwelling. A kind of patrons is Seán Barna, a drummer-turned-singer-songwriter with an irrepressible literary bent and a knack for fusing collectively queer New York’s previous and current. His second album, An Night at Macri Park, is a tune cycle set in and across the Williamsburg bar, exploring what it means to seek out household amid “these queens and freaks I didn’t know I wanted,” as he sings on “Be a Man.” It’s the form of idea album that buzzes with a way of place and character, rendering america’ most populous metropolis as a vibrant small city.
Barna named his first album Photos of an Exhibitionist, introducing listeners to his autobiographical storytelling and the defiantly queer characters who populate his songwriting. His extroversion and fierce want for connection stay hallmarks of his songs. On the rollicking glam standout “Sleeping With Strangers,” Barna seeks refuge in informal intercourse throughout a traumatic 12 months, taking inventory of a near-death expertise with defiance and sass: “I appeared loss of life within the face/That bitch gave me a scar.” He sings in an affected croon that shares DNA with Rufus Wainwright’s, although he’s not shy about summoning the ghosts of an earlier milieu of NYC outsiders. On “Sleeping With Strangers,” he namechecks a problematic fave, making an attempt to reconcile Lou Reed’s artwork with Reed’s therapy of his trans companion. On the downtown fever dream “Benjamin Whishaw Smiled,” he strides by way of the West Village and eyes the condominium the place Bob Dylan as soon as lived. That reasonably priced, artist-friendly Manhattan not exists, however Barna is doing his greatest to maintain the town’s bohemian underbelly alive.
Neighborhood bars may be get together spots, however they’re additionally areas to commiserate and share your sorrows. An Night at Macri Park inhabits each modes, grief and pleasure mingled collectively. On “Disco Nap,” Barna finds solace in dancing, however he additionally alludes to the ache lurking beneath these nightlife thrills: “I’ll all the time conceal my bruises with my greatest pearls,” he wails over Spectorian waves of orchestral grandeur. “The Lonely,” a keening ballad shorn of the album’s boisterous preparations, is extra just like the tearful origin story that tumbles out because the bar empties out eventually name. It’s about Barna’s reminiscences of his early 20s, a interval of mourning his brother’s loss of life and coming to phrases along with his queerness: unhappiness and self-acceptance, by no means too far aside all through the album.
That is raucous, messy, and emotionally wealthy music, as any artwork about queer nightlife should be. There are regrettable hook-ups (the darkwave-infused “Erotic Deficiencies” doesn’t fairly land), the requisite drunken singalongs (“Considering of You”), and weirdly triumphant run-ins with essentially the most sudden individuals (notably Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz, whose heart-on-sleeve vocals match properly with Barna’s aesthetic on “Be a Man” and “Sparkle When You Communicate”). Its boozy environment and glam-rock textures typically recall to mind these nice, mid-’70s information of exhausted debauchery, like Harry Nilsson’s Pussy Cats or Leonard Cohen’s Dying of a Women’ Man. As on these albums, there’s a way of a songwriter each galvanized and drained by the drunken revelry throughout him. However Macri Park’s tone is extra celebratory, the work of a queer man carving out neighborhood at a watering gap the place everybody else is a bit bit broken, too.
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