I discovered this thanks to Pitchfork tagging it lovingly with their "Best New Music" icon. I only mention this because Bear in Heaven's Last.FM page is laden with people making a wide variety of disparaging comments, from the usual "This band sucks now that other people listen to it" to equating Pitchfork's positive review as something of a scarlet letter---which I suppose are basically the same thing.

I'll make this really, really short: anyone who spends time actively, vindicitively hating a website on the internet---not even a real person they know, mind you, but an ambiguous non-entity of alledged unforgivable pretension---is a goddamn moron whose opinion means (or should mean) absolutely nothing to anyone.

Now, Bear in Heaven is some interesting shit. The obvious standout track initially is Lovesick Teenagers which you could listen to on Hype Machine I'm probably sure, so go do that. After that you end up with a whole album of really puzzlingly catchy music that seems really simple.

A lot of the simplicity I percieve I think has to do with my recent forays into trying to make music of my own (I feel a little like that I listen to so much music that I should just inherently know something about making music---but it turns out that I don't) has exposed me to the synthesizer arpeggiator. For those unfamiliar (because I was, which puts me at 24 years without ever touching a synthesizer) an arpeggiator allows you to hold down a key or several on the keyboard and the synthesizer automatically repeats those notes over and over again on at a tempo you set. Various effects make it sound all cool and shit but for the most part it's just notes ascending/descending over and over, usually in 16ths.

The thing is that Bear in Heaven uses arpeggios made this way all across the album. In nearly every song it actually seems that the arpeggio spit out by the synthesizer is the foundation on which the song was built. It's kind of cool, how rich and alive the arpeggioes sound across the whole album---they're obviously synthesizers but when layered with guitar, drums, and the singer's reverb laden vocal, you get such a fantastic wall of sound built out of such a simple formula.

This is good stuff. Pitchfork is right, this is definitely some of the "Best New Music".