14 Iced Bears
Wonder

The 14 Iced Bears are nothing more than just another remnant of what the tail end of the 1980s produced. Hailing from the never too beloved English Indie Pop scene, with a release on the then-influential label Sarah Records (the single “Come Get Me”), Rob Sekula and Kevin Canham—the only stable members in the lineup of the Brighton combo—try to inscribe in a flow of “I wish I could but I can’t” the characteristics of an entire movement, of which they will never be the hub (assuming a hub can be located).

Melodic exploration seems to be the center of the entire work, in a succession of litanies as sticky as they are refined, not so much for qualitative results as for lack of pretensions. “We Are The Normal” sang some (ex) Replacement emulator, and the 14 Iced Bears are completely in it. There may not be Westerberg's poetry, but the same taste for the Pop song form that is never an end in itself. Canham's guitar intertwining often refers to a kind of Smiths filtered through the artistic drive of the Television Personalities. A round trip beyond the Channel. Thus, we can find tracks completely embedded in the stylistic dictates of the English “jangly” scene, with anthems the caliber of “Hold On” (a progression comparable to The Field Mice less wave) or the pop monument “Love On A Sugar Mountain”, so inserted into the British Indie Pop context that it could become one of its symbols. Everything becomes more than commendable when the band ventures into decidedly less Anglophone territories such as the ethereal “Things Are Things” that pays homage to rarefied atmospheres often found in U.S.A. format Indie Rock or when pushing the accelerator, as in the case of “Eyes”, a track that Husker Du could have written after a five o'clock tea with Queen Elizabeth. Worth mentioning is also the penultimate track “Red Now” which manages to bring the band closer to a purely psychedelic musical archetype, as English tradition dictates, yet without losing that omnipresent and unrecognizable melodic vein that has always distinguished them up to that moment. In between are good performances that do nothing but maintain the album's unchanged quality level, sometimes enriching it with valuable cues that, in hindsight, would have certainly deserved more consideration, such as “Smooth In The Sun”, a sort of stadium anthem for bespectacled Indie “kids”, or even “Rare (Like You Are)”, a seductive mid-tempo marked, in its proceeding, by round and soft rhythms.

They seduce and abandon the bears of Brighton, sticking to the cranium cap only to fade away silently, leaving no trace. Afterward, only the conviction will remain that, all in all, they could certainly have reaped more, in fertile sowing times like the early Nineties. But this is completely another (known, abused and, why not, usual) story.