Review of their latest album "89"

The Bear Quartet

The Bear Quartet - Northern
(live at Strand in Stockholm, on the 10th of June 2009)
Références musicales : Sonic Youth, The Pixies, Aphex Twin
The Bear Quartet - Northern (mp3)

(Puisque ce billet est long, pas de traduction en français.
Laissez un commentaire si vous ne pigez pas tout mon blabla)

The Bear Quartet does not make songs. They make albums. At least, this is how I understand their career. Behind each of their record is a thoughtful ambition of what they want to achieve at the moment they are doing it.
Let's look back : between 1992 and 1998, BQ released seven (!) pop albums, then came the UFOs My War and Ny Våg. In between : Gay Icon. After them : Angry Brigade. Two not classic pop/rock records with adventurous ideas. Eventually, in 2005 and 2006 came the experimental records Saturday Night (their masterpiece?) and Eternity Now. After eternity, nothing. Three years of silence for a band that prolific, it means a lot.
Recorded in only five days, 89 signs their come back. As BQ was born in 1989, some will picture it as a back to basics. Guitars replaced computers in the foreground. This does not mean it is a record easy to be loved at the first sight though. It begins as if we arrived in the middle of something - the electro loop that launches the first track Halmet has already begun when the record starts - and ends by its best song, the epic Northern. Compare to Saturday Night or Eternity Now, the whole piece sounds like a proper pop/rock record, compare to a proper pop/rock record it sounds as if every song was teared out in some kind of ways. More than their previous records, BQ changes direction all of a sudden in the middle of a song to take another direction, then come back, then go away. Consequently, it is less classic than Angry Brigade. More adventurous. Less homogeneous. Definitely hard to sum it up. If BQ is not totally convincing when they play their straightforward (dark) ballads (I Am Your Sister, On The Map), the band remains brilliant when their rock music dares to be as free as jazz music (Northern, Millions) .
So, that's it? Well, 1989 is also the year Internet was created. Can BQ's universe and the web coexist? (Unfortunately,) I'm not too sure about that : since nowadays you can download hundreds of mp3s for free in ten minutes, I'm afraid songs have to catch your attention at their very beginning or you will not give them a listen more than once. When I say "you" I mean "most of you". I'm not "you". However, I wonder : why bother making albums in an itunes world? Is anyone still able to listen to a full record from the very first track to the last one without skipping songs? Let me tell you something : to me, 89 is an album in an era where nobody makes proper albums anymore.
PS : 89 will be out tomorrow, on the 09/09/09. Buy it there.
PPS : Matti Alkberg and Jari Haapalainen, two members of BQ, answered my questions about 89 back in June. Matti tells everything about the whole BQ story in this long interview I published a while ago. So does another BQ member, Calle Olsson, in this post.