The
Bear Quartet - Gay Icon
Beauty
and challenges abound with The Bear Quartet’s Gay
Icon album, originally released in 2001. Equal parts blister-raising
lo-fi pop assaults and drop-dead beautiful ballads; if the luminescent
My War album (2000) was a slow and quiet album with their
most private lyrics so far, Gay Icon was, as always,
a reaction against precisely that. It opens with “From
Nowhere”, a short, heartrending piano ballad (“Adam
and Eve were the first unemployed, in love and evicted”),
but as soon as it’s over the mayhem begins. Not since their
early days has the band recorded noisier songs than “Be
A Stranger”, “Capable”, and “Hunchback”,
bristling with raw brilliance and synapse-tweaking frequencies.
In contrast, songs like “Open The Door, Open” (the
celestial lovechild of The Smiths and Cornelius) and “The
Plain No” (your favorite Neil Young, Flaming Lips, and
Sparklehorse songs, enjoyed simultaneously) are as beautiful
as anything the band had created to date. Overall, Gay
Icon bursts with sonic experimentation and soul. The two
incredible singles taken from the album prove that The Bear Quartet’s
remarkable sense of melody is safe and sound. “Load It” is
a sizzling popsong while tongue-in-cheek somber "Fuck Your
Slow Songs", addresses the (r)evolution of their sound,
and their fans' opinion of it: "Nothing's more easier or
more fun than annoying young punks, so we slowed it down and
added strings...". “Like lo-fi-produced Wilco playing
lost Pavement/Grandaddy/Apples In Stereo songs” (Passagen-2001)
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