Bearsuit - OH:IO

Hailing from Alan Partridge country might not place you in a globally-recognised breeding ground for great music, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped Bearsuit from giving it a crack, with an album that contains pretty much every musical instrument ever invented.

It’s a strange beast, with an average song mixing order and chaos in a bowl of no fixed tempo. Some of the more brassy tracks recall the lazily considered pace of early Super Furry Animals, while those reliant on guitar and keys owe more to the intelligent side of 90s indie. On first listen it’s hard to pinpoint the individual tracks that make this tick, though the wonderfully-titled ‘Steven Fucking Spielberg’ has a particularly arresting string intro and a driving beat, whilst ‘Foxy Boxer’ is a great little song that pelts along at a fair tilt - though with the album running to just under half an hour, nothing on here ever outstays its welcome.

There does seem to be a lack of noise in evidence here. Even on the more raucous tracks, when the guitars kick in, they have the sound but not the power to give the tunes a lift out of their generally inoffensive rut - not that this is a bad thing as such. The effect-laden vocals are left to drive the songs along, their occasionally manic male vs. female dynamic recalling early Delgados or their sometime label-mates Prolapse. It makes for an interesting sound, though a live sampling would be necessary to work out how much of this is in the production and how much in the performance.

This sounds like an album out of time - something that would have speared young hearts in 1994 or 2001, when grand and ambitious bands were more in vogue.