Does Wesleyan, the arty Connecticut liberal arts university, attract boys with raw, nasal voices and penchants for shimmering keyboards and huge waves of overdubbed psychedelic guitars to its halls, or does the school simply turn its students into those sorts of musicians? Either way, it has quite a track record of contributing to the Brooklyn music scene (see: MGMT, Amazing Baby, and the other band of Das Racist's Victor Vazquez, Boy Crisis). And now, following the success of MGMT, Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden's former classmates and opening act Bear Hands have thrown their hat into the ring too, finally releasing their full-length debut three years after issuing the Golden EP.
What sets Bear Hands apart from not only their former school friends but also the rest of those outer-borough inhabitants enamored of reverb pedals, ramshackle rhythms, and throbbing bass, is their quirky sense of humor. Frontman Dylan Rau, who has both the unhinged bark of Isaac Brock and the reedy, sinewy whine of MGMT's VanWyngarden, sings about eating cats or Julien Donkey-Boy, the title character in Harmony Korine's bizarre Dogme 95 film. And despite its markedly slower pace and haunting arrangement, "Wicksey Boxing" has its own inherent wit, given that it takes its name from a slurred-drunk pronunciation of "whiskey boxing," a sport best to avoid.
But amid such punning-- and other, more abstract lyrical turns-- Bear Hands have a softer, more earnest side, too. On "Belongings", Rau sings, "At the gentle age of nine, I bought my first 45/ And then I drink, yeah, I drink, yeah... I smoke a little weed." It's a song that's suffused with the excitement of first falling in love with music and a nostalgia for the innocence and excitement of youth. If anything, though, it is Burning Bush Supper Club's musically softer moments that are its weakest.
Bear Hands excel at crafting songs that chug manically under a cloud of reverb or coax wallflowers out onto the dancefloor with an infectious marriage of musical precision and experimental messiness. But after seven straight tracks of upbeat psych-rock, "Wicksey Boxing" kicks off an album-ending run of mostly plodding, mid-tempo tunes. Though Bear Hands get the atmosphere right on these slower tracks, layering echoing effects over sparse riffs, starburst synth crescendos, and Rau's most vulnerable warble, these more muted, intimate songs feel lacking next to the passionate drive and playful spirit of the rest of the album. Overall though, Burning Bush Supper Club is the album Congratulations should have been: one that sharpens the lush, hedonistic surrealism of reverb-laden psych-rock into tightly focused anthems that are just anarchic enough as to be unpredictable.
