Minus The Bear closed the door on a seven-week U.S. tour Saturday night, warming up a freezing bunch of shuddering Seattleites snuggled together for heat and rock in the Showbox Theater. The sold out audience, who lovingly adored their hometown cubs, consisted of an overwhelmingly abysmal clan of weirdoes, minors and relatively imbeccelic dolts wandering around the vast room of deafening sound that can sometimes be the Showbox. Who says no one still watches MTV?
Dozens of excitable bodies ran wild in the green room, stuffing mascara faces with hoards of salty meats and snatching quick shots of Jack Daniels from a bottle hidden in an unplugged microwave, while The Helio Sequence, a similar looking two man electro-rock-combo whose new album Keep Your Eyes Ahead comes out on Sub Pop in January 2008, helped stoke the night’s fire with their own bombastic elegance.
Almost possessed to fist the rectum of every last person in the audience with an intestine-jarring slug of virtue, Minus The Bear chucked out walloping flares from their interstellar pyre Planet Of Ice, including “Burying Luck,” “Thrown’ Shapes,” “Dr. L’Ling,” knocking the hearing out of every head in the room like a committed quintet of seriously fanatical rockers. At one point the bass player told some freakout kiddo in the front row to cool it, but other than that, it was a straight forward serving of esoteric deafness.
The lengthy bridges, slinky keys and airy guitars might have sounded eighteen billion times better, different, more vibrant and expansive, in an outdoor venue such as Red Rocks or even the Gorge. Maybe The Bear can join The Cure at next year’s Sasquatch! next May. The Bear provide that swarthy sort of time travel sound that Dr. Who would have on his iPod, exalting a determination as sadistic as Slayer and as clever as Kraftwerk.
I did feel that the punch Minus The Bear packed made this old grizzly want to return to my cave and sleep, for I am a bearded elder and after enduring such a pulverizing session of insatiable prog-goodness, found my tired soul in need of copious amounts of quiet slumber.
