23 November 2020

AMERIKAN BEAR – The Happiest Days I’ve Ever Ignored (2020, Digital Self-Released)

RELEASE INFO:

Label: Self-Released

Format: Digital, Album, Bandcamp

Release Date: 15 Nov 2020

Amerikan Bear!!! Our favorite California band (San Diego) is back after 6 years with the follow up to their self-titled debut “Amerikan Bear”, released on the last days of December in 2014 and included on my personal list of the TOP Albums in 2015 (making it No2, on that list!). Yes, I was that surprised by their unique and fresh sound, an impressive album indeed! Anyhow, Nathan Wettstead “The Bear” (guitar/vox) along with Andrew Ware on drums and Daniel Ross on the bass-guitar are presenting another 6-songs Album under the title “The Happiest Days I’ve Ever Ignored”, it is initially released as Digital through their Bandcamp page, but Nathan told me that a Limited Edition Vinyl release will follow soon. Let’s take a look at the notes that the band offered on their Facebook page: “We hope you enjoy this album! We have another album in the works and will be updating everyone as that comes. We have some possible live streams and even maybe a “social distancing” show in the future. Once again we hope you like our new album it has been a massive undertaking to accomplish this. The fact that this album even exists is really wild to think about. We aren’t on a label and financed the album ourselves. For anyone who records music, you may understand that studio time, mixing, etc are all expensive. The recordings were done just before Covid hit and we played 4 shows before “lockdown”. Our final show was on Feb 17 or 19 at Soda Bar just before venues were ordered shut a month later. The album obviously is not free and we hope the music community understands that the financial burdens of making an album are included in the costs of purchasing. We have poured our hearts and souls into making this piece of art. To us, it harnesses the experiences we have gone through for the last two years. We look forward to sharing with you the next album that Nathan is writing currently and we will be rehearsing ASAP”…

“The Happiest Days I’ve Ever Ignored” consists of 6 tracks, each one clock-ticking from 5 to 10 minutes. The opener “Ancient Age” justifies exactly the band’s delineation about their music and their ‘genre’. “California Rock&Roll with a 60’s tone”! Yes! Precisely! It seems that all these years since their debut they have “preserved” their unique characteristic sound, full of idiosyncratic elements! Sixties rock sound, guitar-based with somehow buried and volumized vocals, a mutated West Coast late 60s Rickenbacker-ish sounding that makes it possible to be able to hear your adrenaline flowing! Brilliant! Amerikan Bear’s heavy powerful 60s Rock continues on “You People”, amplifiers and mics are on maximum volume and somewhere in there, MC5 meets The Byrds! A good pinch of Stooges, a small pinch of Randy Holden, and a few slices of early 70s Arthur Lee and the explosive mind-blowing result can be heard on “Us Stays We”… Maximum volume for the next one too, “Heaven Don’t Know”, a heavy atmosphere that for once more is remarkably echoing the sound of the 60s West Coast Psych bands. “Teeth Of The Saints” is a more rhythmic tune, not getting away from Amerikan Bear’s sound, getting slower, becoming mellower, and showing another interesting “side” of the band… Eventually, the album closes with “I’m Sorry”, a different song, kind of an ‘isolated’ balladesque tune, full of psychness with an autobiographical feel, a reverberated echoing Psych rock-ballad fueled by a “wild mans haunted soul”… Well done boys! Thank you Amerikan Bear! This is exactly how I want my 60s-oriented-Rock to be sound like, in the strange pandemic year of 2020! TimeLord Michalis