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The Estate of POLARBEAR : Something of Nothing
when everybody things they're flying / has anybody even left the ground ?how can we all be so happy licking off the same stick ?I'd dress you up you know i would / in all the clothes i think you shouldwhen everybody's beautiful is anybody even beautiful ?i might see you but i don't know you / i don't believe you and i won't followhow can we all be so happy licking off the same stick ?
(Lick - POLARBEAR)
POLARBEAR corresponds to the name of the project, active between the mid and late nineties, behind which operated Eric Avery (former bassist and songwriter of the early Jane's Addiction) and the former drummer and sampler of Ethyl Meatplow Harold "Biff" Barefoot Sanders III, assisted by guitarists Dani Tull and Andrew Troy (the first a visual artist who exhibits his works in international galleries, the second a music teacher active in publishing), plus other members (Thomas Von Wendt and John Curry on guitars, Yvonne Bas Tull, Dani's wife, as back-vocalist) who alternated during the too brief and fluctuating musical journey of the group.
An anomalous and truly artistically interesting band, protagonist of just about forty performances, irreversibly and irremediably relegated to the Los Angeles underground, it produced very few things: a Remixes vinyl, an EP, and an Album in a few years, different works that put together an unprecedented mix between dirty electronic funk and alternative rock, Avery and Sanders' love for old computers, new technologies and vintage samples, combined with extremely personal lyrics yet characterized by an emotional distance worthy of a list-maker. A strange musical concoction between Portishead, the equally misunderstood contemporary Beta Band and Wire. The project's leader was clearly Eric Avery, here almost completely purified from the Post-Jane's Addiction toxins and the industrial heaviness of the previous Deconstruction project, who here does not renounce (and could not) his conceptual lyric gloominess, even though the emotional detachment from what he writes and expresses becomes more prominent. The Estate of the Polar Bear is characterized by an obese and weary musical semantics, immersed in low-fidelity electronics, amid the fantastic work of non-trivial and very original guitar crossings by Tull and Troy, and with the bass lines of Avery here differently placed, assigned to a completely different role of electric bass, now sampled, now played live. The poetic universe of POLARBEAR seems to develop in the suburbs, among junk food and iced drinks. Just as Diaframma's Siberia was not a geographical place but a mystical disposition, POLARBEAR's Alaska is not a territorial issue but a condition of the spirit, not a meteorological state, but an Alaska of the soul. The POLARBEAR animal is an introverted beast. The paths PBR were traveling at the millennium's end were the opposite of hipsterism, never been cool as Avery already stated in Deconstruction, traversing human frosts and livid, not well-kept blue roads beyond the confines of American alternative rock, which had then become consumer. Here, the focus shifted to thickness and depth: musical, lyrical, productive, generating sounds and moods that, rather than constituting music, represented an urgent sentimental expression translated into a sort of wounded, very late Californian psychedelia, less violent and perhaps more serene, but no more resolved than the gothic-Californian of Deconstruction (1994).
The first official release of PBR is a cover of Wire recorded for a compilation dedicated to the London group: Whore - Various Artists Play Wire (1996). Here the group reinterprets and proposes a very sophisticated version of "Being Sucked In (Again)" borrowing for the introduction the tail end of another piece from the originating complex "A Touching Display".
A few months later comes the group's first "big" publication. It is a vinyl for Man's Ruin Records that gathers six instrumental pieces remixed (or rather pre-mixed) by the band that would later end up on subsequent EPs and Albums, except for "Nu Flesh". The vinyl bears the title Polar Bear? (12", Blue Translucent - 1996). It is actually quite an unusual release, in light of the fact that generally, in the discography realm, original-mix albums are always released first and after some time the related remix album comes out. Here they evidently think and do the opposite. But so it is. The vinyl turns out to be a strange example of lounge music, with its rarefied atmospheres excellent for a chill-out space.
In May 1997, the group's true debut extended play, Chewing Gum EP, is released by Dry Hump Records. Composed of five tracks, it presents itself as the seal of the first PBR period, the heaviest and most metallic musically and decisively more percussive. In this short-distance episode "Monkey" is a sluggish and then disruptive and then sluggish again evolutionary analysis ("Where I once saw a working stiff I see a noble monkey..."), or rather de-evolutionary ("clock back in again..."), led by Avery, enhanced by a wonderful violin and evocative electric feedbacks, "Gimmee" represents an almost philosophical speculation on the weight, omnipresence, and deceptiveness of religions, "Water" a liberating outburst while observing waters flowing between buildings and cleaning the streets from the stench of modern society, the heavy-jazz-lounge of "Leader" (with a chilling final sonic explosion) is instead a sarcastic derision of media facade leadership self-attributed undeservedly by white collars and "new breeds of leaders" ("show me a new breed of leader, a tabloid superhero..."), with impromptu identity crises that perhaps concern only the sensitivity of their author ("I've got to ask myself who's life am I living?"). But "Leader" is also a farewell to the old Eric Avery who from now on will no longer be the same gloomy and intellectual freak fans of Jane's Addiction had known. Those times are distant and so are the times of junkie-culture that had characterized Avery up to the Deconstruction project, and the strange and ambiguous surfer-blue with orange-shocking hair from the legendary LA group has reinvented himself into an attentive, scientific, distanced observer, increasingly terribly and nervously vigilant about the surroundings, to the point of repeatedly underlining, with a certain pride, not being the same person anymore: "I was then but I am now..."
The year 1999. Finally, POLARBEAR arrives at the long-desired (and only) long-playing. Why Something Instead Of Nothing? (POLAR BEAR RECORDS - 1999) is released in February of that year. Completely self-produced, it will be mostly distributed at the band's concerts and in some alternative music stores in the States. None of the independent US labels will adequately handle it. Promotion of the album will be overly insufficient, and today the album is out of catalog, but despite that, the absolute and definitive quality of the work will not be in the least affected. Recorded at Biff Sanders' Motiv Studio, located in Downtown Los Angeles, Why Something Instead Of Nothing? is already somewhere else, already significantly distant from sounds, moods, atmospheres, and landings of the EP that preceded it. Branded with a smoky sound, like a polluted and sticky evaporation slowly exhaling from a quarter-order ethnic All Night Diner within any neighborhood of the big city, this album is the definitive witness of the POLARBEAR sound magma: Electro-Junk more than electro-funk, an album with a deeply urban character, an observation on the human-junk of American suburbians. "Lick", the opening track, initially slow then increasingly noisy and overwhelming until the powerful final climax, is the last testament of the sound sharpness of the previous EP. With "Friday", we are already in the realm of a noisy and disturbing electronic sound, with its clumsy industrial clangs and echoes of trumpets from a noir film. "Hula" introduces us to a slow-disc track as unsettling as it is incomprehensible, a recreational mechanism based on a contrast of synth bass and hi-hat supported by the sensual choruses of Yvonne Bas Tull and accompanied by brief accents of funk rhythms under a mysterious gelatinous and psychotropic tropical sun, treacherous and unhealthy ("sweet green fruit a bright orange sky... / my telescope shows me there's hope but not enough rope to tie to the sky... / an early moon might save me... i don't want to die tonight..."). "Sharkeye" is the first truly demoralized and desolate passage of the album where a certain resignation to life's matters begins to manifest ("on days like these... / it's left me a little sick..."), with hints of scratches, counterpoints of synthetic violins and above all with an indescribable twilight ending wrapped in Sanders' hypnotic synths, the compulsive chants of Yvonne Bas Tull's choruses and Avery's obsessive mantra that keeps repeating: "One big black shark eye looking down from the sky..." creating a threatening and apocalyptic ominous atmosphere. An intellectual pseudo jazz-lounge music surrounded by sax samples and by tremors, observations, and existential questions under a Californian chemical sky wrapped in acidic and vaporous sunsets: that's how "Shafty" presents itself. The sun goes down and one remains prey to a sense of bewilderment and uncomfortable doubts ("I hear the sea it speaks to me, am I old or I am new again?"). Furthermore, just like the album's entire inquisitive title, all the album's lyrical non-concept continuously questions itself. Uninterruptedly. It's time for "Flyer", a melancholic electro-acoustic sketch characterized by a uniquely classy instrumental interlude, with strings, piano, a beautiful drum sound and an enchanting sampled double bass. "Flyer", dedicated to a deceased friend of Avery, is a micro-opera on the evanescence of affections ("you're an agile flyer...") and the elusiveness and fugitive nature of life and human relationships ("some hang on tenaciously and some let go so easily... / you always seems to be leaving..."). We arrive at "Bodybag", perhaps the least successful track of the album, even though the deep and laudable instrumental shift of the second part is more than noteworthy. "Farm" follows, oozing a certain pneumatic, claustrophobic despair. Musically brave, for sure, with a main analog organ and liquid guitars in the background. Perhaps a bit forced lyrically with its reiterated references to Vietnam. It should probably be clarified that if the reference, in the intentions of the text's author, transcended the mere facts of the sixties to represent the simulacrum of USA imperialism to this day, then the reference could also be deemed appropriate and timely, but not all the intentions of the authors have been disclosed to us. Everyone interprets it as they wish. "Belly" is the album's uneducated musical prank, a brief nursery rhyme little more than a minute and a half placed just before the end. Anyone already familiar with POLARBEAR knows they often deal with stomachs, healthy or sick, strong or weak. The stomach of an architect, the stomach of a former champion, the stomach of an insect, in short, you're inside a polar bear's stomach. The album's last track, with which this desolate existential shipwreck of the polar bear ends, is "Zulu". Marked by a further sense of alienation, "Zulu" seems also to unearth a certain hidden malaise, for the first time not purely individual, but also environmental. The sentimental wandering to which one is subjected also involves, after all, the state of the nation, but at this point, after all this wandering and struggling, one does not humanly renounce a glimmer of saving light. Redemption is possible and desirable: "No shot at redemption, no shot in the dark, no shot at redemption, no shot..."
Why Something Instead Of Nothing? so reaches its terminus, with a looped question circulating unresolved in the brain: why something instead of nothing? The Los Angeles under scrutiny in this album, and generally in the nerd-cut that PBR gave it was clearly a Los Angeles viewed with a transversal eye, a different critical eye. No technicolor Californian dreams, but raw urban portraits in low-fi electronics and dreamlike landscapes for the disenchanted, violet and orange acid rains. Unfortunately, after this only album, POLARBEAR disbanded. Their last cries were a couple of tracks recorded with producer Rich Costey, "Satellites" and "Super Zero", which in their demo version appear less overwhelmed by the electronic frills of the group's previous works but played harder and renewed. PBR were trans-forming again, faithful to their dynamic experimentalism and their compositional and thematic restlessness that totally marked their momentum. We will never know how it would have turned out, while they were changing they were interrupted. However, the season of POLARBEAR represents not at all a missed opportunity, but indeed, a luminous trace of the real alternative musical forces of nineties Los Angeles. The Estate of POLARBEAR nonetheless bequeaths an Album, an EP, and another handful of unreleased tracks of the highest artistic-expressive value and above all the direct testimony of an other Los Angeles, a Los Angeles with unusual and unfaithful semblances to the story that reached us, a Los Angeles with internal emotional hold restrained - almost obligated, always sunny and flamboyant, but chemical, intoxicated, exaggerated, and hallucinated, stuffed with caffeine, devastated by who knows how many and what other additives, restless, sleepless and imploded: ultimately, a Los Angeles as if it were in an arid and radioactive province with no future, grown among carcinogenic debris and thermonuclear scraps, where everything is remote and uncontrolled. An out-tuned industrial sound, on a bad-trip, from a psychedelic disfigured black oil suburb, pale and lost, as mentioned in a piece of theirs, Daytime Television, among commercial products packaged in a Taiwanese sweat shop that explode and paranoid mentally ill people taking shape in dark alleys, among grey visions or obscured and altered lysergics by benzodiazepines. Tasting something of the nothing, of our bitter void. An early moon might save us, while we continue to stare anxiously... Something of Nothing.
- there has got to be a morning sometime
PBR music:for Why Something Instead of Nothing? and Chewing Gum EP: https://soundcloud.com/ericaveryfor info PBR, Chewing Gum EP and Vinyl Remixes 12": http://somediverswhistle.com/ericavery/ (all in open source and/or free download. no copyright infringement - so.. enjoy!)
Over and Out........
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