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Minus The Bear are pretty hard to place. They've never been
critical darlings, but their albums have done modestly well, landing
mainly in the lukewarm three-star range - and they're not commercial
blockbusters either. But over the span of their 10-year career their name has
started popping up in the bottom half of billboards across the world.
The public doesn't really know where to place them in the great
hierarchy of rock 'n' roll bands. Minus The Bear have a distinct
sound, but it seems they've never really pushed themselves,
instead opting to revel in the mid-level House of Blues circuit realm
of modest pay and modest popularity.
So it may seem that their latest record Omni is a reaction to
everything people find frustrating about the band. Minus The Bear
have created a perplexing, occasionally enthralling (and occasionally
flat-out goofy) mess of an album, mostly about sex. The arcane time
signatures and math-informed musicianship is still here, but never has
the band sounded so willfully whimsy. Loungey opener My Time is
probably one of the most awkward sex songs ever written, occasionally
reaching face-palming levels of face-reddening lyricism: "You taste
like sweet wine, we are magnified, the sweat rolls down your thigh."
Into The Mirror features a narrative about a blowjob in a bathroom so
blatant and gratuitous, it's almost as if it simply has to be metaphor
for something else. Omni is thoroughly dominated by these plain-faced
themes of sexuality, rendering it rather off-putting on first listen,
especially coming from a band like Minus The Bear.
The musicianship displayed on Omni is still very impressive. Minus
The Bear have always got by on their talent for building spiraling,
inter-wrapped melodies of icy guitar and computer-programmed drums, and
all of that is in place. However as before, despite how technically
impressive the quintet is, they still have a hard time latching in to
the listener. Omni suffers significantly by not having any really
memorable moments - its atmosphere is impressive and is remarkably
distant from influences, but the record can honestly be a bit of a
chore to listen to. Minus The Bear's sound is so chiseled, so
sterilized, that the hormone-fueled emotions they are singing about
are lost in the mix.
However you've got to give the band props for trying, Omni could've
easily been another average, run-of-the-mill Minus The Bear album,
destined for praise normalized into a collective "yeah that's pretty
good, I guess". And as it stands Omni is a slightly less than average
Minus The Bear album with a huge amount of batshit ambition and
misguided songwriting that results in an hour of music that isn't a
whole lot of fun to listen to, but has a plenty of weird kinks to talk
about. If the world wants to point at the band's best album it's
easily Planet of Ice, but if we're in the business of recognizing a
group's ethos, Omni stands as the prime example of what Minus The Bear
want to achieve.
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