Concert le 4 octobre à l'Espace B

"After unveiling hints on instagram, Bear In Heaven is excited to announce their new album, Time Is Over One Day Old (out August 4th on Dead Oceans). Aptly titled, it's a record with a visceral relationship to time and its processes." When bands age well, their vitality takes shape. They wear, but with intention. They trim excesses. Bear In Heaven has always made intriguing records. 2007's Red Bloom of the Boom is ambitious and experimental. Beast Rest Forth Mouth (2009) was a pivotal record that introduced them to the wider, wilder world. It's a work that still feels important, seductive and intense. On their 2012 LP, I Love You, It's Cool, the structural and musical ideas are masterfully developed yet it sits at a strange remove and is a record as much (or more) about observing as it is about participating.

On Time is Over One Day Old, we witness the band once again turning their gaze inward and prioritising their evocative abilities in line with or even slightly ahead of technical skills. It feels very much in the tradition of Beast Rest Forth Mouth in that way. It's beautiful; it's moving. They carefully balance moments of joyful simplicity and deep complexity. It's easy to see why musicians fall hard for this band. They entice and envelop you. Any Bear In Heaven song will most likely greet you with a provocative beat, textural synthesizers and unassuming but adeptly supportive bass and guitar, all exquisitely arranged and glistening. It's a kind of density that you want to bite right into. Jon Philpot's high, smooth, strong voice is so tightly wound into the music that it can be easy to overlook the lyrics, Bear In Heaven's capacious third dimension. Philpot is a center-seeking, contemplative writer who captures the fleeting thoughts that underscore our emotional lives, the interactions with the world that are both difficult to express and anathema in daily conversation.

Here Philpot and Adam Wills are more deeply collaborative than ever, in no small part because of the shared frustrations that have recurred as topics of conversation throughout the 10 years of living as a band together. This album is darker at times, louder than their others; it feels personal and direct. Relatively new to the band, drummer Jason Nazary adapts and adds to Bear In Heaven's sound and structure. Wills, who is gregarious and outspoken in person, has always been the bands anchor, providing rock solid, rhythmic bass lines and guitars that blur the boundaries of Philpot's synth. This album isn't about being dark, it's about releasing darkness and frustration.

Philpot recognises that being in a band isn't a normal way of life. In speaking about Time Is Over One Day Old, he says, "we're setting aside the things that most people focus on [and instead] staking our claim in some ethereal place". For him this is about making something lasting. "A lot of shedding, getting rid of layers and pre-conceptions... breaking up with old ways of thinking, old ways of being, starting to look at this thing in a new way and finding something positive." The result is a record that will stay with you.

Philpot sums it up: "...that's about all we can do; make people feel something."