Review -- Chuck Eddy

Here is a nice review by Chuck Eddy, former music editor of the Village Voice, and author of the books Stairway to Hell, and one of our faves from back in the day, The Accidental Evolution of Rock 'N' Roll.  This was from a cool blog that is unfortunately no longer with us, Paper Thin Walls:

http://www.paperthinwalls.com/singlefile/item?id=1389

FROZEN BEARS - “Speaker Suicide” 8.0
from "Hey, That's A Good Lookin' Sportcoat!" (self-released)
Art-Rock // Out Now

FROZEN BEARS Somebody should explain to Frozen Bears (alias Adam Waller from New Orleans and his pal Kevin Hurstell from Baton Rouge) that speakers don’t kill speakers, people do. Though admittedly “vices, loops, hiss, bass, treble, mids, flange, distortion, reverb, pitch-bending, circuit-bending, noise-gate abuse, the on/off switch” (all listed on their MySpace page as influences, along with the 13th Floor Elevators, Chrome, Flipper, Neon Boys, White Light/White Heat, etc.) might help.

Either way, the 2:04 “Speaker Suicide” (basically just an extraordinarily lovely Amon Düül/’70s Eno/ESP-Disk Godz/Hapshash And The Coloured Coat-style swirl of voices deadpanning about time tripping-and-slipping away and guitars doing the sort of “mood strumming” stuff that Frank Kogan has said people from New Zealand and northern Ohio are often especially good at) is one of my favorite tracks on the Bears’ excellent eight-track (though unavailable on 8-track) 18:22 “Hey, That’s a Good Lookin’ Sportcoat!” (quote marks part of the title, just like that Dylan album a few years ago) CD-R EP (not an album—you need 20 minutes for one of those, according to old Pazz & Jop rules), the cover of which features two cyclopses in spacesuits, who are theoretically Waller and Hurstell but don’t be so sure.

“We’ve both played in a bunch of local bands (Scripts, Black Rose Band, Slobot, Otasco),” Waller tells me over e-mail, “and this is an experimental/psychedelic/art-rock recording project we’ve been doing for seven years or so. We write and record (on tape!) in my home studio with kind of a loose ‘let’s-see-if-this-works’ approach. For the most part we improvise as we go, not really knowing where a song is going to end up when we start. It’s lots of fun.” And it’s fun for me, too!

Said self-released extended player starts with its poppiest song (“God Is Winded,” nasaled somewhere in the vicinity of, I dunno, Undertones/Jacobites/Soft Boys/Auteurs or whomever) and ends with its two most placid shoestring-budget shoegazers (“Enigma Machine” and “Brown And Chrome”), with neato stuff in between such as the Public Image Ltd. cross—rhythms in “Lost Cosmonauts” and the beautiful bargain-basement Von LMO astronomy-rock of “Trembles And Shambles.” All clearly tossed off with minimal (or, more likely, negative) attention to sound quality, which somehow helps make it all feel wide-eyed, lovable, listenable and just generally mysterious in a way you didn’t know avant-fuzz-drone-whatever bullshit could be anymore. Or at least I sure didn’t. - CHUCK EDDY

Comments

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