Album Review: Bear in Heaven – I Love You, It’s Cool
There’s a lot of pressure on a new release when your previous album received the Best New Music award from Pitchfork, a Web site notorious for being so easily unimpressed that I’m sure that if it had been around in 1967 it would have lambasted ‘Sgt. Pepper’ for being lazy and uninspired. However, Bear in Heaven have released their third album ‘I Love You, It’s Cool’ in a bid to step out of the successful shadow of their critically acclaimed 2009 record ‘Beast Rest Forth Mouth’.
In an innovative PR stunt, the band made ‘I Love You, It’s Cool’ available to stream on their website but slowed the entire album down by 400,000%; stretching its running time to 2700 hours, or 112.5 days (don’t be too impressed with my maths, I used a calculator). Perhaps a message from the band that the album takes time to truly get it? I’m not sure.
Onto the actual content of the album. It’s hard to listen to the album without it reminding you of several others from different artists. At first listen, albums that immediately come to mind are ‘LP’ by Discovery and Passion Pit‘s ‘Manners.’ Not to mention the fact that Bear in Heaven’s vocals are straight out of Phoenix‘s ‘Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.’
Everything about the 10 tracks seem standard and a tad repetitive, which is a major danger with this genre of music. It’s hard to have an electro-pop album such as this that doesn’t overuse the synthesisers making all the songs sound far too similar. Sometimes this is a style that can be quite effective but not here.
Tracks such as ‘Cool Light’ and ‘Kiss Me Crazy’ both have the same flaws. There’s just too much going on in the song; all the instruments and long-noted vocals overlap and create a slight mess of a song. Actually, a note that could be carried across all the songs on the album is that synthesisers and drums take front seat and vocals and every other instrument are relegated all the way back to the car boot.
Deviating from the formula that made ‘Beast Rest Forth Mouth’ a success, you have to admire Bear in Heaven for taking a risk with ‘I Love You, It’s Cool’ but it’s not a risk that paid off. In short what I’m saying is, this album has been done before and it’s been done better. Got a hankering for some synthesised, high-pitch electro? The market is full of much better options.
3.5/10
Bear in Heaven’s ‘I Love You, It’s Cool’ is available now from Dead Oceans.
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