HOME CONTACT US Get our RSS feed: DISCLAIMER: Music hosted on this site is for preview purposes only. If you like what you hear please buy the artist's work. You can find much of it here: ARCHIVE February 2007 January 2007

The Three Bears We have a friend called Percy the Bear. He’s not a real bear, nor is he a big, hairy homosexual man, he’s just a pal who loves bears. StoNu’s answer to Timothy Treadwell helped us set up Pinglewood and as we’re writing about records made by bears it seemed only right to holler at our boy. Person Pitch is the third solo LP from Polar Bear (AKA Noah Lennox, member of our favourite freak-folkers, Animal Collective) and it’s been on constant rotation at the pinglepad. Lennox moved to Lisbon last year and ditched the acoustic sound of his previous work, replacing it with a dense sea of endless tape loops and evocative field recordings over which he spins the kind of opulent, celestial melodies that are his, and the Collective's, stock in trade. If you've ever thought that Steve Reich's process music would sound even more awesome if Brian Wilson was crooning woozily over the top, then this is the album for you. The song we've picked for you to listen to is Take Pills, a lovely ode to chemical-free living that's built around (we think) the sounds of someone skating a halfpipe. As with most AC stuff it sounds less like one song than two or three huddled together round a campfire. As we're very literal-minded we thought the best artists to augment this most ursine of posts would be Grizzly Bear and Polar Bear. Last year, Brooklyn-based Grizzly Bear released one of indiedom's best albums, the haunting, expansive Yellow House. The album's choicest cut, Knife (which has one of the best music videos we've seen for a while), recently received the remix treatment from hipster's favourite Girl Talk. He takes the whispered original to the dancefloor and cuts in liberal chunks of Clipse's crack-baking anthem Wamp Wamp. It's nothing if not ambitious. Next we have London post-jazzers Polar Bear. We'd like this band for drummer Seb Roachford's hair alone, but it's nice that they also write a good tune. Polar Bear's last album, Held on the Tips of Fingers, picked up the never-going-to-win-but-nice-to-be-recognised token jazz nomination at 2005 the Mercury Music Prize and they recently posted a demo from their forthcoming third LP on their website. It's called Balloon Tune or Balloon Bounce, something to do with balloons- anyway, it's great. Polar Bear are just one of supremely talented but super-timid Roachford's many bands. He's also in Acoustic Ladyland, a jazz-punk band led by Polar Bear saxophonist Pete Wareham, who, in turn, also play's in Roachford's new band- the less-jazz, more-prog/post-rock Fulborn Teversham. More on them later in the week. One more thing. Today we learnt that the collective noun for bears is 'a sleuth'. That's very cool. Panda Bear - Take Pills [mp3] [Buy] Grizzly Bear - Knife (Girl Talk Remix) [mp3] [Buy] Polar Bear - Balloon Tune [mp3] [Buy] And here's our favourite Animal Collective song, just because we love it. Animal Collective - Winter's Love [mp3] [Buy] Posted by: Scott 26/03/07