...former bandmates Adam Waller and Kevin Hurstell reconvened in Waller's tiny apartment bedroom to explore the depths of their musical symbiosis on Adam's 4 track (a Tascam Porta 3, pretty much the lowest-end model available). Armed with a couple of guitars, whatever they could find to use as "drums", their Schlitz addled imaginations, and a barely functioning, cheesy guitar effects processor from the early 90s--the Digitech RP-1--Frozen Bears set out to create a 4 track love letter to their record collections, and their imagined record collections in "the future."
In the year 2000...the sword of Damacles was dangling over the head of rock n' roll as we knew it. With club kids, abstract hip hop artists, and the Chemical Brothers set to take over the world, one of the inspirations for the album was the duo's various stabs at the directions rock music could take to compete with the emerging wave of DJ culture that was taking over at the time. Many games of "what if" led to spontaneous creations that the band built into songs as they went along. The result is an intricate mix of stimulating, and stunningly contrasting influences. Danceable beats and loops are merged with raw, stripped down punk energy. Found sound like lectures and sound effects from thrift store LPs are often substituted for vocals. On 2000, the Bears blur the line between art and raw power, taking cues from fellow lo-fi, home taped duos Chrome, Ween, early Pavement, and Tall Dwarfs; psychedelic heroes like the 13th Floor Elevators and The Seeds, the raw garage aesthetic of the Pebbles/Back From the Grave collections; and standbys like Sonic Youth, GBV, the Misfits, Man..or Astroman?, the Stones, early Beat Happening, Flipper, White Light/Heat era Velvets, etc.In the year 2000...the duo made roughly assembled dubs for their friends as they recorded songs throughout the year. Graduation, new jobs, Waller's move to New Orleans, weekend work, and their various other projects put the Frozen Bears on the backburner for a while. In 2004, the band got back to work putting together a homemade ep containing four songs that would wind up on 2000. An early review from the zine Horizontal Action:
"...Mesmerizing sound regenerating with SONIC YOUTH avant guardedness and eerie background noise combine to scare you into submission. Dirty patterns develop quckly into more paranoid rhythms that make you really wonder what's going on here. Art rock has not been this low-budget in ages and it's raw force is really something to behold for yourself. This stuff worries me. Will I get a disease this year, Or will I conceive a monster that will eat me alive and spit our my underwear? God, I hope neither!"
In 2007 put out a new ep, "Hey, That's a Good Lookin' Sportcoat!" Former Village Voice music editor, and author Chuck Eddy gave the band a glowing review on the now defunct but sorely missed paperthinwalls.com. Later, on the Rhapsody blog, he included the album on his list of top albums for 2008 (#115). From the review:
"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."
So the band unearthed the original Type I cassette master tapes from that first wave of sessions, and put together the album, 2000. The final package was put together and released in the spring of 2009. Keeping with the spirit of the sounds contained therein, the CD-R was done up 100% DIY, with a silkcreened jacket, spray-stenciled disc, and photocopied insert. The band sent a handful of copies out to selected radio stations, and was thrilled to see WFMU accept their CD-R demo and give it some airplay. The week of July 10, Frozen Bears 2000 landed on WFMU's top 30/Heavy Airplay list. (http://www.wfmu.org/Playlists/Wfmu/top30.090708.html) The band is also being played on WUSB, WTUL, KLSU, and hopefully soon, a station near you.
With the end of the decade coming up, and everybody scrambling to get their definitive lists together, the Frozen Bears invite you to take a listen to part of a time capsule from two obsessed music fans paying tribute to their favorite music at the end of the century, hypothesizing about the coming decade, and the directions raw rock music could take to move a crowd as effectively as any DJ on the planet. Whichever you find more entertaining--the lucky guesses, or the comic flaws--Frozen Bears' 2000 should make for an especially evocative listen as The Aughts come to a close.
You can contact Frozen Bears at frozenbears2@hotmail.com.
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