Radio K presents BEAR IN HEAVEN
Bear In Heaven will be streaming their new record, I LOVE YOU, IT'S COOL, from start to finish starting this Monday at noon until April third at midnight. The band has slowed down their LP by nearly 400,000% to play exactly once starting today and ending on the day the album is released. Go to their website to check it out.
"As a band, we have always sought to balance our interest in art and outsider music with a sense of humor about our place within the entertainment industry. When we began discussing the making of our third record, two recurrent themes emerged:
1. The desire to release a companion piece of music that was more abstract and drone based than the material we had played every night for the last 18 months or will likely play for 18 months straight following the release of this record.
2. An equal desire to have a little lighthearted fun with and comment on the current state of album promotion, hype cycles, countdowns and all the marketing ploys that we accept as a reality of existing within an internet age.
At some point these two ideas merged into one. We would stream our album earlier and for longer than anyone else had before but we'd stream it once. We'd stretch it far beyond the limits of being recognisable as pop music. Draw it out so that snare roll lasts for days. Invite listeners to interpret and consider each sound. Sit back and breathe." [Bear In Heaven, December 2011]
BEAR IN HEAVEN
After months of testing their limits and trusting their instincts, Bear in Heaven will emerge in April 2012 with I Love You, It’s Cool, an album so vivid and visionary that it meets and even exceeds the confidence and calm its title suggests. In 2010, Beast Rest Forth Mouth delighted listeners with the unexpected—futuristic rock music that didn’t sound alien or bound to ostracize. Taking these songs from coast to coast and continent to continent, they learned that having fun with this music was copacetic, that they could delight a crowd while defying musical binaries. I Love You, It’s Cool turns that realization into a peerless set of instant anthems. Indeed, some of these songs are ready for the floor. In one a perfect guitar figure spirals through colossal drums and slabs of synthesizers. Elsewhere bliss booms in icy keyboards reflecting off a relentless throb. It’s inescapable.
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The intricacy and edge of Bear in Heaven’s music is sharper than ever before. The programming is both complex and compelling, whether in the refracted rainbows or woven noisy matrices. Certainly, in places it feels like a hit, with hooks that instantly catch and bridges that curl a finger—lyrically, stylistically, temptingly—toward the dance floor. Bear In Heaven’s mix of nostalgia and need is immediately relatable, too, bringing the band’s exploratory sounds a little closer back to home before they exit in momentary space-rock ascendance, a readymade rock-club banger that erupts into a bold new direction. I Love You, It’s Cool is the first time Bear in Heaven has sounded so unapologetic and so evolved, so risky and so redeeming, so focused and so finessed. After years of restless exploration, this feels like a definitive arrival. I Love You, It’s Cool is music written in the present tense but ready to speak to the future. The work is its own rarified reward.
BLOUSE
Blouse is based out of a warehouse in Portland, Oregon. The project started in the summer of 2010, after Los Angeles native Charlie Hilton met Patrick Adams in art school. They began spending nights at the warehouse recording with Jacob Portrait. After posting two demo tracks to Bandcamp, the group was picked up by Captured Tracks out of Brooklyn, NY. The first 7″ single Into Black was released in March 2011, and Sub Pop Records released their second single Shadow two months later.
DOLDRUMS
Doldrums is a musical venture produced by Canadian artist Airick Woodhead (Spiral Beach). As a part of a larger community reacting to overhype and plasticity of modern youth culture and it’s ultimately alienating nature, his music deals with, or helps him deal with, the loss of the individual in an increasingly altruistic society. Doldrums music reflects this societal change on the personal level, as a member of the last generation to remember life pre-internet and 24-hour status updates.
