• Courtesy Of Luke Awtry
• Graham Brooks

The first time I saw Barishi play live, I dumped an entire whiskey down a young man's shirt, lost a $20 bet with the woman working the door and lied to a bartender about being in an Electric Light Orchestra cover band just to explain why I was wearing sunglasses at night at an indoor show.

(For those keeping score, the whiskey dump was an accident because that kid didn't know how to mosh, I bet the woman at the door that someone in the band would have an "802" tattoo, and I was wearing shades because I had scratched my cornea taking out a contact lens the night before. Metal!)

Even with all those extracurricular happenings, what I remember best about the show is being blown away by the finest metal band I'd ever heard come out of the Vermont scene. Barishi had power, they had precision, they had just the right amount of fantasy aura — or what my old friend and guitar teacher Tom used to call "dragons and mist shit" — and they had what all great metal bands need: a killer guitarist.

The Brattleboro-based band still would have been transfixing without Graham Brooks. But something about the way he attacked his guitar, with equal parts ferocity and sophistication in his melodies and note choices, elevated the band's music to its highest peaks.

Now, I'm sure you haven't missed that I'm writing about Barishi in past tense. Which, technically, isn't totally accurate. Barishi are still a band — but only for three more shows.

"We did a hometown show at the Stone Church last week," Brooks explained in a phone call. "So we've got this weekend in Winooski, one in [Queens], and then our last show as Barishi will be in Worcester, Mass."

Once Brooks recovered from my screaming "WHY?!" into the phone for five straight minutes, he revealed the reasons for the band's demise. Or rather, its metamorphosis.

"Honestly, it's been sort of a gradual thing," Brooks said. "It probably started because I'm just one of those people who can listen to a record he made and be fine with it, but a few months later I hate it. I just wasn't in love with those songs anymore."

To compound Brooks' ambivalence about the band's earlier material, Barishi had hardly been active since the pandemic — playing only a handful of shows, in addition to backing indie singer-songwriter Sasami on her latest record and tour. Even as the band was contemplating shaking off the rust and returning to the studio and the stage, founding member and bassist Jon Kelley decided to leave.

Brooks had formed Barishi in 2010 with Kelley and drummer Dylan Blake while the three were still in high school. "To lose someone that had been there from the beginning and part of every moment of the band's life, it just didn't feel right to keep calling it the same thing without Jon there," Brooks said.

In addition to the personnel, Brooks noticed his writing was changing and, with it, Barishi's sound. The songs were more and more sprawling, and the band's dynamics were getting more nuanced, subtly shifting between melody and dissonance, power and rest.

"It's not, like, massively different than what Barishi was doing, but yeah, there's a lot of small differences in the new material," Brooks said. "We'll be playing some of the new stuff at our Winooski show, so hopefully people don't throw cabbage at us."

That show, which goes down on Saturday, April 15, at the Monkey House, will be Barishi's last performance in their home state. Fear not, though. Brooks and Blake will be back with bassist Joshua Smith as — oh, wait, let me do this properly here...

New band alert! From the ashes of Barishi shall rise ... Ordh! (Cue lighting, thunder and an epic guitar riff.)

According to Brooks, the new band name comes from the Old English word for "blade," though the bandmates tossed an H on there because, he said, "we can't just go slapping an umlaut on everything, right?"

I, for one, can't wait to hear Ordh. But I'll hold a little spot in my heart to mourn Barishi properly as they finish out this period of their career. Farewell, gents. I'll throw up the horns for you at the Winooski show.