Who in the hell were the Gay Barbarians? We landed this amazing full length album from this amazingly obscure San Francisco trio (that also subtitle themselves "the Jaurwars" - what the fuck?) in the midst of the recent avalanche of Charnel Music titles we've found ourselves buried in, and were stunned by the bizarre, supremely melodic and catchy post-rock-space-noise-sludge-pop weirdness these guys created. From what little we've been able to glean, we guess this is sort of a Subarachnoid Space spinoff, 'cuz Chris Van Huffel from Sub Space drums for the 'Barbarians, alongside a fuggin' thick dual-amp guitar assault drowning in fuzz and distortion but belting out catchy, really heavy indie rock riffs that remind us of the slackest 90's shit (think Dinosaur Jr., Pavement, even My Bloody Valentine at some points etc.) but way more destroyed and baked in fried amp noise, bulldozing thru layers of analog synths dropping all kinds of whooshing cosmic tronix, droning sheets of gauzy, shoegazey noise, and LOTS of fucked-up, mutant noises into the Gay Barbarian's bent psych crunch. Some of the tunes give up on the rock entirely, and just engage in splattered electronics and stoned synth abuse. Apparently the dude from E-Zee Tiger is in this too? Bohemian Special is all-instrumental (save for some ambiguous vocal splurt that's near unidentifiable), and is definitely in the vicinity of The Fucking Champs and Trans Am in terms of sheer heavy/anthemic post-rock delight, but these tunes are a much more fucked, baked take on distorto "post-rock".