Minus The Bear

Mon 10th May, 2010 in Features

While Seattle maybe identified as the birthplace of grunge it is also home to the self assigned prog pop indie-rockers, Minus The Bear. This band has never been afraid to push musical boundaries, through experimentation with both powerful lyrical content and vast soundscapes.

It is day two of a six week jaunt around the US (“Yesterday was the first show which was is in Spokane, Washington… It’s barely on the map but it was a fun show.”) and from a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town in Montana, Minus The Bear lead singer and guitarist Jake Snider took some time out to talk about OMNI, the bands fourth long player and their most experimental work to date.

The band’s continued experimentation has lead to the use of a Japanese Omnichord Synthesizer in My Time, the lead single from the album OMNI. “As the record was going on I was thinking about the word OMNI and how it means everything, it means all and relating to the lyrics it kind of made sense. This record seems to be about being all encompassed by something or someone so I felt like it was a cool title that ultimately worked. Slightly inspired by the Omnichord.”

OMNI is full of intricate sounds and layers and when asked whether the album translates as well live as he’d hoped Snider concedes, “a lot of the songs are somewhat difficult to work out. To have them actually sound somewhat like the record, we have to have some drum machine tracks and some other things going on so we try to bring as much of the record to the live show as possible”.

The band finished recording in September of 2009 and Snider admits that “it would be nice to be able to fix everything that you notice in that massive gap of time between recording and release, but it is the record we made when we made it and that is the way it is. You’ve gotta accept the mistakes.”

OMNI wasn’t officially released until early May, but was already floating around in cyberspace ahead of schedule. “This is the latest that we’ve had a record leak,” Snider reveals. “It’s pretty amazing that it only leaked two weeks ahead of the release schedule. Our last one was maybe three months before but this one has been pretty controlled and everybody and service that we got on the record has been really respectful of keeping it off the internet.”

“Now it’s great, it leaked the first day of the tour. It leaked the day that the album stream went online anyway so it is going to make people more excited for the record and the tour that we’re on right now. They’ll hear the songs that we’re playing before seeing the live performance. It’ll be good.”

The album’s producer Joe Chiccarelli has a swag of accolades to his name (including ‘discovering’ Tori Amos and working on the new Strokes album). “We were talking to a number of producers for this one,” Snider recounts, “and when his name came up it instantly went to the top of the list. When we met with him firstly in Seattle for dinner, he was just a great guy and seemed to really get what we were doing and get what we were after. We were just fans and understood what he could hopefully add to the equation. He did a pretty bang up job of squeezing new material out of us.”

As for what they were after and how Chiccarelli extracted this from the Minus the Bear five gents, Snider esplains that the bands “wanted a big sounding record. A record that had a lot of weight to the tones and to the drums. We wanted to have something that we more immediate and leaked out of the speakers, something less subtle. That’s Joe, his engineering is really in-your-face and that’s the reason why we were really drawn to him.”

While they have a heavily tour schedule which currently revolves the US and Europe, Snider responded to the question of the possibility of an Australian tour simply with, “we plan to tour as soon as possible hopefully. We’re going to do this tour here and a couple of dates in the UK in August but I’m sure that we’re working on Australia as we speak.” So a 2010 return in support of OMNI isn’t off the cards yet.