Friday, April 6, 2012

Bear in Heaven - I Love You, It's Cool

I Love You, It's Cool LP 

Bear in Heaven (April 5th, 2012)




Track list - 
01. Idle Heart (3:48)
02. The Reflection Of You (4:19)
03. Noon Moon (3:46)
04. Sinful Nature (5:13)
05. Cool Light (4:11)
06. Kiss Me Crazy (3:23)
07. World Of Freakout (4:25)
08. Warm Water (4:23)
09. Space Remains (4:16)
10. Sweetness & Sickness (6:14)

 For a band that spends more than two years between studio albums, Bear in Heaven don't seem to have hang-ups about fucking around with the final result. This has worked out well for them: 2009's breakthrough Beast Rest Forth Mouth was the result of streamlining the proggy excesses of Red Bloom of the Boom into something familiar, wholly of the moment, and yet impossible to pin down-- you knew some combination of "indie," "rock," "synth," "dance," and "electro" should work, and yet not a single hyphenate stuck satisfactorily. A year later, the band commissioned artists ranging from High Places to Justin Broadrick for Beast Rest Forth Mouth Remixed, which defied all expectations associated with indie rock remix records by actually being pretty good.



 Now a group whose albums can be described as "highly anticipated," Bear in Heaven masterfully punctured the hype cycle by slowing their third LP, I Love You, It's Cool, by 400,000 percent and streaming it on their website for over 2700 consecutive hours-- if you missed it, the deluxe version of I Love You comes with two hours of it. But besides being one hell of a PR stunt, the drone version of I Love You unintentionally laid out a crucial rule of engagement for Bear in Heaven's latest artistic divergence: Don't rush to judgment with this thing. It might not take four months for it to finally click for you-- but it might.

 Wisely, the Brooklyn-via-Alabama trio use "Lovesick Teenagers" as the jumping off point for I Love You, specifically the Lindstrom & Christabelle version that appeared on Beast Rest Forth Mouth Remixed. The result won't be wholly unfamiliar due to Jon Philpot's boyish, confidently projected vocals, and even with all the crystalline textures, you never lose sight of Bear in Heaven as a wood-and-string, flesh-and-bone rock band at its core. The difference here is that while BRFM was a consistently locomative record, it took most of its rhythmic cues from easily identifiable indie precedents: the redneck punk-funk of Modest Mouse, Animal Collective's electronic tribalism. There's more of the Field in the way opener "Idle Heart" and later "Cool Light" play out: short, anticipatory windups that slowly thrust forward into a momentum that's constant throughout and never feels as fast as it actually is. This lends I Love You a structural fluidity that can make it slippery upon the first couple of listens, verses and choruses identifiable while in progress, but ending and beginning a few bars earlier than you'd usually expect.
Though I Love You doubles down on sequencers and digitization and was forged in the midst of Bear in Heaven's seemingly endless touring regimen, it's worth keeping in mind that they're not looking to carry hard drives for your favorite Kompakt producer. As Philpot memorably sings amidst the strobelit propulsion of single "The Reflection of You": "If you could dance with me/ I think you would like my moves." Note "if" and "think," which is really indicative of how Bear in Heaven write more about the idea of dancing than dance music proper-- someone who refers to "my moves" is likely a dead giveaway for a wallflower at heart. It's a contrast that works for them, as I Love You generates a legitimate libidinous charge amidst the friction of their new four-to-the-floor rhythmic constancy and the remnants of their previous itchiness: drummer Joe Stickney dropping flailing solos on "Cool Light", the bent guitar melody that prods Philpot like the sleep-depriving light pollution described on "Noon Moon", penultimate "Space Remains"' laser-tag meltdown. They could just be vessels for the uneasiness spilling over from Philpot's lyrics, which dare to get literal so as to portray the narrator as embittered, self-loathing, morally casual, or just out for a good time. "Kiss Me Crazy" indulges in a mutually destructive and irresistable romance that makes you think its title is missing a comma, while "Warm Water" gives itself up to some of I Love You's most beatific passages while masking its austere rejection. The synths hush as Philpot sings, "get up, c'mon," something that can be mistaken for a call for action when its context calls for closure: "I wanna love/ Without feeling your love."
Tracing back to why I Love You is such a slow burn, there's a fundamental challenge to Bear in Heaven's attempts to integrate the vast, incremental buildups of Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Axel Willner within the context of four-minute indie rock songs with their expected allotment of payoff. Weirdly, it's most evident in "Sinful Nature", even though it immediately jumps out the way "Lovesick Teenagers" did. As with "Lovesick", Philpot's lyrics are simultaneously empathetic ("You're let down by God/ You're let down by boring strangers") and conspiratorial ("Let's get loaded/ And make some strange things come true") toward its subject, and it's a hell of an arrangement, too. After the opening flashbulb pop of disco synths, the deep, liquid undertow of the rhythm section sounds like it could ebb infinitely. And yet, there's a point after Philpot sings the title and the beat drops out that "Sinful Nature" and I Love You beg for release, yet they strangely demur amongst the rising action, leaving a wash of backmasked reverb as the climax. I Love You never allows itself that chance to boil over again, and considering Beast Rest Forth Mouth remained unified despite its occasionally volcanic choruses, the solidarity of I Love You wouldn't necessarily be compromised by a couple of visceral peaks. The protracted cohesiveness leads to other minor quibbles I can't quite shake: the simonized synth textures and Philpot's piecemeal approach to constructing melody causes a couple of lulls where the record bleeds together, and the opium-laced swirl of "Sweetness & Sickness" feels like a closer marooned from some Bear in Heaven record that isn't this one.
Plenty of records from established bands seem to underwhelm on first listen, but what thankfully kept me coming back here? I think of recent releases from Tanlines, the Antlers, Chairlift, and Hooray For Earth that functioned in a similar way-- each from New York, each possibly identifiable as "synth-pop." It's the kind of thing people point to when trying to figure out why Brooklyn doesn't appear to be on the cutting edge of indie rock anymore, but it's an unfair projection to assume that's what Bear in Heaven are aiming for. Similar to Burst Apart or Mixed Emotions or Something, these are songs that feel welcoming because of how they reflect and integrate themselves into real life-- the people, relationships, and emotions described herein are relatable and open-ended, and hell, considering the sound of "urban maturity" is typically seen as strictly the realm of baritones and bassoons, it's refreshing to think Bear in Heaven and their colleagues might be onto a refreshing alternative. It'd be unreasonable to expect Bear in Heaven to keep writing "Lovesick Teenagers" over and over again as adults with messy romantic complications, and I Love You, It's Cool is admirable in large part because its ambitions are every bit as subtle and difficult to quantify as its pleasures-- you don't have to call it "adult indie," but it feels like conflicted indie rock for adults.
-Pitchfork.com