Bear In Heaven

A mix of electronic pop/dance, shoezgaze, prog and cosmic psych, Bear In Heaven seem like the perfect headphones band: layers of music that take time to reveal themselves to the listener, requiring concentration and focus. It’s something of a surprise, then, to discover the NYC three-piece are actually a brilliant live band who strip back the layers to become quite the fun, danceable band. Joe Philpot, Adam Wills and Jason Nazary are the three men who combine to make Bear In Heaven as much a “heart music” band as a “head music” one. Watching them onstage, it’s fascinating to watch the trio transform the expansive songs from best album Beast Rest Forth Mouth into concise and snappy pop songs for the watching crowd to move from head nodding to outright euphoric dancing. ‘Beast in Peace’ moves from being a dark, creeping track to a muscular pop song with a hint of Krautrock to it, while the band’s best known track ‘Lovesick Teenagers’ sparkles with synth washes and Philpot adds spidery guitar lines to make it something of an indie rock classic that deserves to be played in clubs everywhere. What you also notice live is how great Jon Philpot’s voice actually is; on record it’s slightly buried under the layers of instrumentation but take that away and he’s got a lovely, slightly high croon that really deserves to shine a bit more in the studio. It’s always nice when a band surprises you with a live show, and in Bear In Heaven’s case it adds another layer of enjoyment to their music.

The incredibly ambitious Bear in Heaven have been touring around and impressing audiences with their brand of psychedelic/electronic music since 2003. Their signature sound relies heavily on large open soundscapes of reverberating guitars and vocals creating psychedelic sounds that are likely to put one in a coma of musical goodness. Deep, electronic sounds are arpeggiated using ominous scales, but somehow they are hauntingly catchy. The band is a four-piece that uses guitars, bass, drums, and keyboards, but all the sounds of these instruments seem to melt together forming one huge amalgamation of beautiful sounds. The leads on the synth are the most prominent sound in the music that seems to punch its way through the rest of the syrupy sounding pleasantries of music. There are also several songs where the guitar is played in the angular manner of post-punk music. The high treble tones of the guitar pierce through the atmosphere of music creating a jangly edge.
Bear in Heaven have also incorporated interesting characteristics from the krautrock genre by using bizarre sound manipulations and strange effects to create a droning like quality to their music. There is an element of surprise that Bear in Heaven seems to radiate. Just when you are grooving to one of their more poppy tunes, they will take a drastic turn and start performing noisy, experimental sounds that will drone off into the distance.