Barnyard Drama is the Toronto husband-and-wife duo of singer Christine Duncan and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Jean Martin, though more recently the group has doubled in size with the addition of guitarists Justin Haynes and Bernard Falaise (the latter on loan from Montréal’s musique actuelle scene). The churning guitars and dark, hallucinatory sound of I’m a Navy set it apart from other offerings on Barnyard Records, which generally tend towards quiet, everyday surrealism (as the punning title of one release on the label puts it, “piano music”). Some of the pieces are too arch, especially the overripe The Blues and Duncan’s faux-naive ballad about “that butt’ry burning feeling”, sung in a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth British schoolgirl accent. But the air of wicked mischief is generally quite engaging, the musicians conjuring up a black magic rite out of grungy blues, snarling electronica, and the guitar-driven meltdown at the end of The Big Gundown. Duncan’s voices range from gorgon to sexpot to blithering idiot to chanteuse, but isn’t mere grotesquerie (which tends to wear thin very quickly, as witness countless free-improv vocal albums); she takes the trouble to really occupy these different personae, until the music becomes a dizzying meditation on female innocence and experience. Great choice of cover tune, too: the lyrics of Noel Coward’s Little Girl Blue may express bemused pity for the girl, but the music’s already leaving the human scale behind, floating off into the zero-gravity dark, the stars twinkling all around in detached bemusement.