Album Review: Rick Barry – A Sunk Cost Fallacy and the Enduring Mirage

Rick Barry is a sad bastard who has been not-so-quietly releasing albums of loss, heartbreak, and melancholy since something like 2006, and his latest effort, A Sunk Cost Fallacy and the Enduring Mirage, is another stellar addition to a discography that serves as almost a catalog of human sadness. The album, with its purposefully esoteric title, features tender ballads, straight ahead pop rockers, and even near-country/near-parody songs that serve to support Rick’s honest voice and his almost superhuman insight into the minds of characters struggling with some form of grief. It’s almost a concept album about a breakup, but it’s a little too easy to pigeonhole it into something so straightforward: rather, the characters in Rick’s songs are all people struggling against the darkness, and it’s within that struggle that Rick finds an underlying humanity, a sort of salvation in the grief. The album starts with the delicate, near-fragile “Almost Time Immemorial” which features a beautiful (let’s call it lush) strings and woodwind arrangement over Rick’s tender, near cracking voice. The song feels like it’s about bittersweet memories, a phrase that would probably make Rick gag, but within the images painted, we begin to feel how painful looking back on the good times can be for the narrator: it’s a sort of mission statement for the album.

The album goes through a couple of different phases: after “Almost Time Immemorial,” we move through equally beautiful ballads, with subtle, simple arrangements that highlight Rick as a singer, guitar player, and lyricist, until the band drops in for a moment on “Bury Me,” which is as close to a straight-ahead love song you’re going to get on this record. It starts as almost a gospel ballad but takes a beautiful left turn in the last minute or so when the band crashes in and the song becomes a plea, a statement of purpose. “When the preacher at the altar/married me to you/I swore that it would be forever/so just bury me with you.” It’s a love song about assuming the worst and obsessing about the bad times even when things are, it would seem, at their happiest. Sad bastard.

This album is not a record to be put on in the background. It requires full attention. The arrangements turn on a hair, and the lyrics need you to pay attention in order to unpack. It’s an album that rewards repeated listening, but don’t let that dissuade you: tracks like “No Such Luck” and the brilliant album closer “Signing Off” are catchy, clever, fun songs that belie a pop sensibility that the rest of the album almost feels like it’s trying to work against. There’s something to be said for the balance of irony and sincerity in this record – how much songs like “Memento Vivere” are sincere in their indulgence of the sad bastard singing them versus how much of a sort of ironic detachment we should assume, as both listeners and Rick as a narrator; and digging into that question of sincerity is as fruitful and rewarding as you can hope to get out of an album as a listener.

I could spend a lot of time here telling you about the moments in this record that hit me on a deeper level, but I don’t want to spoil anyone’s take with too many of my own highlights. There are turns of phrase on this album that sent me for a loop (“Your mother used to play the flute/your father was a prostitute for corporate pimps” on the straightforward country rocker “Finish What You Started” for one), there are songs that have gripped me on arrangement alone (namely, a very specific drum groove “The Ardor of Bloom” that opens up the song in such a powerful way), harmonies, clever instrumental solos, and new approaches to what at first could feel like well-trodden ground. I could sincerely go on, but I don’t need to do that. Rick can do all the talking for himself and do it a lot better than me. A Sunk Cost Fallacy and the Enduring Mirage is a cohesive whole, a collection of 11 songs that can break your heart and maybe also rebuild it if you let yourself listen to the sad bastard.