If nothing else, Brooklyn synth rock outfit Bear in Heaven has certainly perfected the art of ostentatious noise on its third album, I Love You, It’s Cool.
Working under the assumption that more is better, Bear in Heaven has crafted a record of pop songs processed through enough heavy synthesizer swells to make even the blandest of tunes sound like an epic space battle.
Sounding epic, however, does not actually make a song epic. For all the cavernous reverb and rolling synth arpeggios, Bear in Heaven’s songwriting is nothing special.
The group’s last record, Beast Rest Forth Mouth, received notoriety for its deft mixture of condensed Krautrock and abnormal yet catchy songwriting. I Love You, It’s Cool, on the other hand, forgoes a lot of the originality from the previous record, instead incorporating a healthy dose of dance beats and the occasional gimmicky sound effect.
By no means a bad record, I Love You, It’s Cool misses the mark because its appeal is mostly surface level. The breadth of timbres on single “The Reflections Of You” are initially quite arresting, but on repeated listens the track sounds like a composition that School of Seven Bells could have done just as well or M83 could have done much better.
Meanwhile, the album’s consistency suffers because Bear in Heaven’s best tracks far outshine the boring ones. While the dizzying electronic heights of “Sinful Nature” and “World of Freakout” are sure to arouse listeners, subsequent tracks such as “Kiss Me Crazy” and “Warm Water” rely on short ideas that overstay their welcome.
A quick look behind the wall of noise on “Space Remains” reveals nothing – the song is so reliant on its sound effects that without them the song has no value. After just a few listens, the random blips and bleeps the track is composed of simply can’t uphold the audience’s attention.
Still, for listeners interested in shoegaze-affected synth-pop that sounds as if it just arrived from the 1980s in a Delorean, I Love You, It’s Cool will make a great addition to the collection, pink-pastel cover art and all.
VERDICT: An interesting collage of sounds, I Love You, It’s Cool loses focus when it comes to melodies, leaving little to return to on repeat listens.
berman@umdbk.com
