Sweden's most critically
acclaimed and innovative band |
The Bear Quartet's creativity
seems endlessly flowing and they recorded two beautiful albums, Cosy Den and Family Affair and the EP Revisted before they took an involuntary break in the spring of 1995 when Jari and Urban moved to Stockholm, and Johan left the band. Later that year the fourth album; Everybody Else is released as well as two EPs It Only Takes A Flashlight To Create A Monster and Flux Detail. The Bear Quartet's creativity was far from exhausted and they started working on the next album, Holy, Holy. It's not until now that the band consciously slows down. They manage to stay away from the rehearsal space for two months. When they go back in they work differently; without a goal and without a deadline. The songs grow wild and beautiful. In June 1996 the songs start to feel finished. Then The Bear Quartet suffers another drummer loss when Urban decides to devote himself to something utterly different. After some time they find a dignified successor in Jejo Perkovic (also drummer for the hardcore band Brick). During three weeks the band records 23 songs. Five of them hese can be found on the EP Before the Trenches and eleven on the masterpiece Moby Dick. |
The Bear Quartet has always
been the critics' darlings, but after Moby Dick the Swedish music press
where desperately searching for new, undiscovered superlatives to describe
The Bear Quartet's outstanding compositions. During the spring of 1998
The Bear Quartet recorded their seventh full length album, Personality
Crisis. with a large and helpful input by Carl Olsson (of Blissful) and
Björn Olsson (Union Carbide, Soundtrack of our lives). |
The Bear Quartet was on a creative high, and late 1999 the songs for My War were mixed and mastered. My War was, according to major Swedish rock critics, the most introspective and realized album of the band so far. Sort of a The Idiot for the 21st century. Two Eps are taken from the album: Old Friends and I Don´t Wanna. Both living proof of the Bear Quartet´s genius. If My War 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 a short, heartfelt piano ballad (key lyric: Adam and Eve were the first unemployed, in love and evicted) but as soon as it´s over the mayhem begins. Not since their debut, Penny Century (1992), has the band recorded noisier songs than i.e Be A Stranger, Capable and Hunchback. Overall, Gay Icon bursts with sonic experimentation and soul. The two Eps taken from the album, Load It and Fuck Your Slow Songs does prov that The Bear Quartet´s remarkable sense of melody isn´t lost at all. And it should be said that
if you favour the bands more balladry side you´ll find lots of songs
on Gay Icon that will blow your mind completely. |
That much said though, in recent live shows the band has been presenting new material which seems to be more classic pop songs (anthemic choruses and all), with lyrics perversely focusing of fatal accidents, near death experiences and vengeance. Another, not yet named, masterpiece of an album has been recorded for a late summer release. An album which insiders claim is the punkiest and at the same time most commercial record the band has delivered in years. The intense, and quite insanely funky, All Your Life (as well as three previously unreleased bangers) has been chosen as a taster and yet another chapter is written in the continuing saga that is the Bear Quartet. What can a band - that has done almost everything to such great artistical grandeur really do next? Wherever the Bear Quartet goes, only one thing is for sure: no ones ever been there before. And the story continues. Whatever happens, one can only imagine what the outcome will be. |
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