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Minus the Bear

March 26, 2017 @ 7:00 pm



Minus the Bear

March 26, 2017 @ 7:00 pm

Dress Code

NONE

Venue

Royale Nightclub Boston, MA
279 Tremont Street
Boston, MA 02116 United States

Organizer

Bowery Boston
Phone
617-451-7700
Email
info@boweryboston.com
View Organizer Website

Other

with
Beach Slang, Bayonne
advance:
$28
day of show:
$30

Bowery Boston presents

Doors: 7:00 pm / Show: 8:00 pm

This event is 18 and over. Patrons under 18 admitted if accompanied by a parent or legal guardian.
Tickets on sale Fri. 1/13 at 10AM!

Tickets available at AXS.COM, or by phone at 888-929-7849. No service charge on tickets purchased in person at The Sinclair Box Office Wednesdays-Saturdays 12-7PM. Please note: box office is cash only.

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Minus the Bear

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Over the course of their 15-year career, Minus the Bear have carved out their own unique musical world. This isn’t to say they’re impervious to outside influence. They’ve borrowed components from a wide swath of genres—the brainy clangor of New York’s proto-punk scene, the cerebral buzz of IDM, the poptimist evaluation of hip-hop and R&B, and the grandiose visions of prog rock—but always managed to defy classification. Throughout the first decade of their existence, every new album offered a new musical approach, as seen in the idiosyncratic fretboard gymnastics of Highly Refined Pirates, the glitchy loops of Menos el Oso, or the modernized Fripp-inspired wizardry of Planet of Ice. By the time the band entered our current decade, their knack for reinvention yielded to an emphasis on refinement. Albums like OMNI and Infinity Overhead searched for a middle ground where their myriad of stylistic approaches could all work within the context of a single record.

On their sixth album VOIDS, Minus the Bear started with a blank slate, and inadvertently found themselves applying the same starting-from-scratch strategies that fueled their initial creative process. “There was a lot of change and uncertainty,” says guitarist David Knudson. “I think the general vibe of emptiness, replacement, lacking, and longing to fill in the gaps was very present in everyones’ minds.” Change was everywhere. Keyboardist/vocalist Alex Rose took on a more prominent role in composition and handled lead vocal duties on songs like “Call the Cops,” “Tame Beasts,” and “Robotic Heart,” drummer Kiefer Matthias joined the fold, producer Sam Bell lent a fresh set of ears in the studio, and the band returned to their original label home at Suicide Squeeze Records. Minus the Bear were no longer swept along by the momentum that had driven them for the last fifteen years. Instead, they reached a point where they could recalibrate and redefine who they were as a musical entity. The resulting album VOIDS retains many of the band’s signature qualities—the hedonistic tales of nighttime escapism and candid vignettes of adulthood, the savvy up-tempo beats, the layered and nuanced instrumentation—while simultaneously reminding us of the musical wanderlust that initially put them on the map.

Album opener “Last Kiss” immediately establishes the band’s renewed fervor. An appropriately dizzying guitar line plunges into a propulsive groove before the chorus unfolds into a multi-tiered pop chorus. From there the album flows into “Give & Take”, a tightly wound exercise in syncopation that recalls the celebratory pulse of early Bear classics like “Fine + 2 Pts” while exploring new textures and timbres. “Invisible” is arguably the catchiest song of the band’s career, with Jake Snider’s vocal melodies and Knudson’s imaginative guitar work battling for the strongest hooks. “What About the Boat?” reminds us of the “math-rock” tag that followed the band in their early years, with understated instrumentation disguising an odd-time beat. “Erase,” recalls the merging of forlorn indie pop and electronica that the band dabbled with on their early EPs, but demonstrates the Bear’s ongoing melodic sophistication and tonal exploration. By the time the band reaches album closer “Lighthouse,” they’ve traversed so much sonic territory that the only appropriate tactic left at their disposal is a climactic crescendo, driven at its peak by Cory Murchy’s thunderous bass. Not since Planet of Ice’s “Lotus” has the Bear achieved such an epic finale. All in all, it’s an album that reminds us of everything that made us fall in love with Minus the Bear in the first place, and a big part of that appeal is the sense that the band is heading into uncharted territories.

Suicide Squeeze Records is proud to release VOIDS to the world on March 3, 2017 on CD, LP, and cassette. Nick Steinhardt designed the artwork and layout for all formats. The first pressing of the album is available on 5,000 copies of splatter colored vinyl and 5,000 copies of 180 gram black vinyl. The LP jacket features PMS inks, a die-cut cover with a printed inner sleeve and contains a download code. The cassette version is limited to 500 copies and includes a download code as well.

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Beach Slang

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Beach Slang are a band who have garnered a lot of attention considering that they’ve only released two 7-inches, 2014’s Cheap Thrills On A Dead End Street and its companion Who Would Ever Want Something So Broken? Refreshingly this Philadelphia-based act have built their hype the old-fashioned way, without any gimmicks or marketing teams, which makes sense when you consider that frontman and writer James Alex cut his teeth in the Pennsylvania pop-punk act Weston while drummer JP Flexner and bassist Ed McNulty also play in buzzed about projects such as Ex-Friends and Crybaby. However there’s something indefinable about Beach Slang’s music that evokes the spirit of punk and juxtaposes it into something that’s as brutally honest as it is infectiously catchy.

“When this whole thing started it was like, ‘Alright, i’m going to get to hear my sappy little songs played loud and interact with other human beings again,’ the admittedly shy Alex says looking back on Beach Slang’s existence. “Then one day this really sweet explosion happened and Beach Slang became a thing that mattered to people.” As anyone who has seen Beach Slang live can attest, it matters to people a lot including the group’s peers like Cursive who hand-selected Beach Slang to open for them on their upcoming headlining tour. “I used to skate with this really sweet girl who would refer to the way I spoke as ‘beach slang’ and I’ve never shaken that off,” Alex continues. “The really soft parts of your childhood, I suppose, have a way of sticking around. I like that.”

That feeling of youth and vulnerability also lie at the core of Beach Slang’s music, which is part punk, part pop and all catharsis. It references the ghosts of The Replacements but keeps one foot firmly rooted in the present. It’s fun and it’s serious. It’s sad but it isn’t. It’s Beach Slang. Enjoy it and look out for the band’s debut full-length later this year because they’re still just getting started.

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Bayonne

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Roger Sellers is a lot of things. He’s a minimalist composer with a knack for making hypnotic, enveloping songs from a few repeated musical phrases. He’s a gifted musician who is mostly self-taught, having abandoned formal study because it was draining the life from his work. He’s a self-described disciple of Phil Collins. What he is not, however — despite multiple press reports to the contrary — is a DJ.

“I started developing a decent following in Austin,” he says, “but most of the time when I would play, the press would say something like ‘Local DJ Roger Sellers,’ or ‘Roger Sellers is playing a late-night DJ set.’ I think it was maybe because my live set involves a table full of gear, a drum set and headphones, but the average person probably knows more about DJing than I do.’” To combat the misunderstanding, Sellers printed up stickers reading, “Roger Sellers is Not a DJ,” and eventually adopted the alias Bayonne, changing his name without altering his approach.

And it’s a good thing: Primitives, Sellers’ debut as Bayonne, is a rich, complex work, the kind with no clear rock parallel. In its winding, maze-like structures are hints of both Steve Reich and Owen Pallett, each instrument working a single melodic pattern over and over and over, as Sellers threads his soft, reedy voice between them. On songs like “Appeals,” the effect is hypnotic: notes from a piano crash down like spilled marbles from a bucket, as Sellers’ ringing-bell vocals swing back and forth between them. The end result is spellbinding music, meticulously-crafted songs where each tiny piece locks into another, and hundreds of them joined together create a breathtaking whole — like dots in a Seurat, or tiny bones in a dinosaur skeleton.

Sellers’ journey to Bayonne began when he was two years old, situated in front of Eric Clapton Unplugged at his home in TK. “I’d just watch it over and over again,” he laughs. “I would get paint cans and bang on them, trying to imitate what I saw in the video. My parents got me a drum set when I was 6 years old and I became obsessed. I wanted to be Phil Collins for so many years as a child. He was my hero. I feel like you can hear that a lot in Primitives, that big drum sound, because so much of the way I play was learned from Phil Collins.” Though Sellers studied classical piano as a child and music theory in college, rather than developing his skill, he found both to be deadening. “It became homework,” he says. “It made me come home and not want to write. That’s not at all how I’d thought about music — it had always been something fun — almost like a kind of therapy. It was an escape, not a chore.”

Instead, Sellers struck out on his own, buying a looper and slowly amassing a stockpile of tiny melodies. “I found out that I could make these songs really spontaneously and have this really good idea without having to get into the studio to capture it right away. Most of these songs came out of me just fucking around, hooking up keyboards and experimenting.” The experiments cohered into music that is beautiful and densely layered. The composition of the individual musical phrases may have been spontaneous, but assembling them to create Primitives was anything but. Instead, Sellers constructed the songs from a collection of loops he’d built up over the course of six years. Some of those patterns were created on stage at his shows, where Sellers threads melodies together in real time, augmenting them with live drums and vocals. Others were written during downtime, improvising at home. Once he had the basic melodies, he had to figure out how they went together, and how to layer them meticulously to make songs that were rich in deep detail but still immediately engaging.

You can hear all of that in “Spectrolite”; taut apostrophes of guitar enter first, pinpricks of barely-there sound that blink like Christmas lights. Bone-dry snare enters next, but the guitars keep echoing their same hypnotic phrase; it’s followed by grumbling bass and, finally, Sellers’ airy, high-arcing voice; each piece follows their charted course again and again, but as the song goes on, it gets more engrossing — it gives the effect of slipping slowly into warm water. “That one came from an older loop that I had,” Sellers explains. “It was about a stone that my girlfriend at the time had brought me back from Australia, a spectrolite stone. We had some things happen between us during that time, so that stone meant a lot to me. I had it with me the entire time I made the record. It’s a song about forgiveness, and keeping those people who matter most to you close around you, and caring for those that you love.” In “Waves,” surging piano replicates the sound of the ocean, lapping slowly forward and back. Giant tribal drums enter, filling the blank space, giving the song a soft, calming, see-sawing rhythm. “That’s a song I basically wrote by performing it live,” Sellers says. “That’s one of my favorite songs that I’ve written because of the simplicity of it,” he explains. “You feel like you’re in the ocean or something.” But as the song goes on, it skews darker. “I know that there’s something else, something else, something else,” Sellers sings, “And I know that you’d be there for me.” As the song goes on, the object of his affection drifts away, like a boat toward the skyline. Like all of Sellers’s songs, it centers carefully constructed music around the soft, glowing core of the human heart.

“That’s all of it — emotion,” Sellers says. “I want the music to carry people in some way, and I want them to feel what I’m feeling. I want my music to be an emotive expression.” On Primitives, Sellers creates music that’s nuanced, layered, complicated and soothing — easy to get lost in, impossible to ignore.