- Album: 'Adventure Club Records'
- Genre: 'Indie'
- Release Date: '11 June 2012'
Our Rating:
Any memorable and long-favourite album needs an effortless flow of emotional unity that folds a listener into the places and times where it is first heard. After a while, after years, those places and times rush back with emotional force as strong as the first elation or despair. Each of us have a small clutch of such records in our lives.
This BEAR DRIVER recording has the rare potential to be one of them. It's an album of elation rather than despair, but even despair would be sweeter with this music as balm. I keep listening to it, but every time it restarts I go off into another world and forget to pay the detailed attention you might demand of a critic. Riffs and textures and melodies ebb and flow like ripples on a seascape, details emerge and recede like birds in a forest, memory goes on holiday. Colours intensify, fade and return.
Researching BEAR DRIVER sets up a similarly psychotropic feeling. I remember enthusing about a Cumbrian band called SAMSA in 2003. Oliver and Jamie Deakin, with other friends contributing, issued a delightful album of songs called "Working On The Inside". I wrote about it having a magnificent secret track that outshone the rest. The current BEAR DRIVER has the same Oli Deakin on vocals and guitars, with Harry Dean on vocals and guitars, Richie Harwood on drums, Jon Rulton on Bass and Joseph Croft on Keyboards. Across the intervening years, and especially in the most recent ones there have been other projects in the Deakin family saga. My list of cognates and agnates now includes OLFAR, LOWPINES and WALL. There are probably more. All of these, and any further branches of the lineage that emerge should be sought out. Sought is the right word. These people pay lots of attention to their art, but seem refreshingly (or is it perversely?) free of the compulsion to push it into lives that won't value it.
BEAR DRIVER's self-titled album is a shimmering psychedelic guitar and vocal harmonies thing, with a surprising toughness in some of the playing. The muscle holds the gentleness aloft and keeps the attention bright. Romantic whimsy, if there is any, always needs some harder oak.
"Big Love", the album-defining first track, rushes in with furious tempo and glittering guitars. Vocal harmonies stream like Californian dreams and hearts are opened. "It's big big love … it's shining through!" 1967 is thoroughly reinvented but convincingly evoked. Later dream enthusiasts like THE BIGGER LOVERS (coincidentally?), or APPLES IN STEREO or BEECHWOOD SPARKS seem to have something in common. Gentleness, pleasure and appreciation of electric guitars and rolling harmonies are all complicit, but no conspiracy is suspected. The music will trigger good memories and specific associations for every listener.
With such a title, "Enemy" has an unexpectedly bouncy la la la tune with a lovely chorus. It is quite devoid of animosity. "Never never" features a singing-guitar melody opening and breathy lovelorn vocals It shows the slower, dreamier side of Bear Driver. The reprise of the guitar line, to fade, is perfection.
"Drones" is special. It's a nearly out-of-control rush of adrenaline that seems to urge the pursuit of emotional thrills beyond the point of any return. "Just keep your hands on the wheel" they chant. But then the album takes a swerve and a moment to stop and listen afresh. "Colours Run" has a mantric almost mathrock guitar intro, brisk drumming, and a great surge of mysterious conspiratorially poetic words. "this means nothing to us anymore now the colour's run / the fears keep coming but they come undone" There is a delightful female vocal just beneath the surface. Listen carefully.
"No Time To Speak" is a big ecstatic song. There's a huge tune right there in the intro. Fuzzing guitars and keyboard haul electricity through sinewy choruses. "You're not out of reach, you're just harder to get to" they sing.
"Cats" has a melodramatic opening and there's a suitably cat-like dissonance in the song. The lyrics include the disarming suggestion "we'll play hide and seek till the cats come home" To cap it all, a magnificent Duane Eddy tribute guitar solo introduces its second half. Cats have taste.
"Impossible" features a cunningly played acoustic guitar. A moody tune carries a long verse full of whispered words, and a gorgeous chorus repeats "you can't look back, it's impossible" into a soothing distance.
The album's big climax is the closing track "A Thousand Samurais". It's a chugging eight to the bar guitar song with full vocal delights, woven with tumbling phrases and warm, enveloping bass. It's a glorious thing that just opens out and loves the whole world. It's my favourite song of the year by miles. "this song's about a weeping willow tree and a thousand samurais". How could it not be? It also has a classic guitar solo and perfect flow. Sit back in you imaginary cinema, listen, and watch those credits roll.
