Gay Icon by the Bear Quartet - imported from Sweden by Listening Post Music

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)

Imported from Sweden by www.listening-post.com. Also check out Moby Dick, Gay Icon, Saturday Night and Angry Brigade by Bear Quartet.

Price - $17.00

Tracks

1. The Formula
2. What You Wanna Say
3. Shadows
4. Progress Report: It Can't Get Much Worse Than This
5. The Worst of Everything
6. Last Rites
7. Desire
8. Inside
9. The Greatest Escape
10. A Combination For Disaster
11. A Song For the Dance Floor
12. Bringing Up the Dead