The
Bear Quartet - Moby Dick
 Artist: The
Bear Quartet
Title: Moby Dick
Catalog#: WeCD141
CD
AVAILABLE AGAIN SOON
|
Tracks
on this CD: |
| Before
The Trenches |
| I'm
Not In Here With You (You're In Here With Me) |
| Wounded
Knee |
| His
Spine |
| Where
Do you Put Your Hate |
| Machine
Gun |
| Earthly
Pastime |
| If
You Had A Heart |
| Bad
On The Halo |
| A
Hole Was Dug |
| Bastard |
| |
Over
the next few months, Parasol will offer the complete recorded
works from
Sweden's most revered pop band, The Bear Quartet.
Let’s start you off with the band’s 1997 masterpiece,
'Moby Dick', shall we? This is The BQ album where "the songs
grow wild and beautiful", where the
layered guitar rock of their earlier work is balanced with the
baroque fey-pop sophistication and experimental deviousness adorning
their albums ever since. If The Soundtrack
Of Our Lives are the classic rock resurrectionists of Scandinavia,
then The Bear Quartet are the proto-pop overlords Sweden's answer
to Badly Drawn Boy and
Guided By Voices. They are not a "retro" act;
they simply write gorgeous, catchy pop songs full of fierce wit
and melancholy, tuning in and turning on to
their influences (The Beatles, Go-Betweens, Prefab Sprout, Teenage
Fanclub, The Smiths, Neil Young, and The Velvets) while resurrecting
themselves, defining themselves.
The Bear Quartet have always been critics' darlings, but after ‘Moby
Dick’, the Swedish
music press were desperately searching for new, undiscovered
superlatives to describe this..this... well, I, like those scrambling
Swedish scribes, have discovered that mere words cannot describe
the passion bursting from this album. If you can sit through
the
opening salvo of lead-off track “Behind
the Trenches”, the lush exotica
opus that is “His Spine”, and the grand pop opus "A
Hole Was Dug", without something stirring, well…well,
I don’t know what.
“One of the 10 best Swedish albums ever” --Aftonbladet
(Sweden’s largest newspaper)
"Although Moby Dick is the Bear Quartet's seventh album
in five years, it has the freshness of a band making their debut.
It marks a subtle but important shift away from their earlier
records, in that the songs are a bit meatier and slightly more aggressive than
before, with rocking guitars taking precedence.
There's also a new sense of exploded song
structure, with four of the 11 tracks stretching between five
and nine minutes, adding lengthy solos and extended instrumental
sections without sounding padded or jammy…
Yet there's still a delicacy to songs like "Where Do You
Put Your Hate," with its pealing guitars, churchy organ
and Byrdsy harmonies. The band's usual strings-and-horns
accompaniment is deployed more sparingly than usual and therefore
more effectively, as in the simple muted trumpet lines gracing
the mopey "If You Have a Heart" and an unexpected
country rock influence creeps in on "Earthly
Pastime” --All Music Guide
View
more Bear Quartet releases...
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