MINUS THE BEAR/JOAN OF ARC, Future Perfect, Bully,
9/16/17
Bright math twiddling.
Thick bubbling synths that could be slowly achieving consciousness in
Herbert West’s laboratory. Insectile
lops and insistent drum tattoos. Periods
of drone stasis and sonic wave therapy.
Some floppy old second tier Britpop glam. Oh, and it was all going so well. Joan Of Arc set up some wonderfully eclectic
and enticing music – think Parts & Labor with a smidgen of Bardo Pond and a
dash of Tomaga’s dub-inflected churn, for starters – and then, intermittently,
some clumsy sub-Molko vocals parachute in and ruin it all. There’s even some frankly worrying vicar in a
youth club gyrating. It’s as if the band
felt they needed some vocals to make the music acceptable, no matter how
unsuitable. If so, the singing adds
legitimacy whilst being actively unpleasant.
A bit like the DUP, perhaps.
Still, there’s more than enough great stuff to enjoy here, and Joan Of
Arc repay attention with a varied sound that could be four different bands
battling for supremacy over 30 minutes; let’s hope the three good ones attain
ultimate victory.
Minus The Bear might come from Seattle, but they could
have been bred in a petri dish to please Oxford musicians. They have a post-rock veneer, with some jerky
guitars, staccato keyboards and vast punnetfuls of pedals, but beneath it they
make big, old-fashioned yearning rock music, all impassioned choruses and
reverby star-seeking solos. There are
times when their slick wide-angle rock resembles the articulate, post-Radiohead
bounce of Maximo Park, and there are times when their brief tics and stutters fail
to hide unashamed stadium bombast, like Zooropa
era U2. At the final whistle, what
looked to be a close fight at first becomes a walkover, glitchtronica
references floored by guitar solos on the crash barrier, enveloping textures
thrown aside negligently by tastefully epic vocal angst. Like our own Kanadia magnified, Minus The
Bear are very good, but we wish they’d just give up the half-arsed post-rock
pretence, buy some proper smoke machines and a big fuck-off fan and kick Brian
May off the roof to take become the unfettered, billowy-bloused rockers they
are deep inside.
