Plumbiferous Media

Seat­tle indie-experimental band Minus the Bear released their fourth LP, Omni, ear­lier this month. Minus the Bear has enjoyed increased pop­u­lar­ity over their last three albums, and it seems as if Omni will be no dif­fer­ent. With it, the band takes the approaches of their ear­lier albums and dis­tills them into the exper­i­men­ta­tion of Omni. How­ever, while Omni cer­tainly shows cre­ativ­ity and skill on the part of the band, it suf­fers from a num­ber of seri­ous flaws that pre­vent it from reach­ing excellence.

Though nei­ther the sound style nor instru­men­ta­tion of Omni is ter­ri­bly orig­i­nal, Minus the Bear does spend quite a lot of time devel­op­ing the instru­men­tals. As a result, save for the occa­sional nau­se­at­ing stereo effect, Omni pro­gresses quite well, and is both catchy and inter­est­ing. The best tracks, includ­ing “Secret Coun­try,” have obvi­ous sec­tions, made up of numer­ous, densely com­bined, indi­vid­u­ally excel­lent lines that flow and crescendo into one another, all the time main­tain­ing a sense of cohe­sion, while the most that can be said about the worst is that they, for their con­sid­er­able length, grow some­what tiresome.

Addi­tion­ally, while some odd issues do pop up, such as the near-out of tune grat­ing between the bass and gui­tar on “Sum­mer Angel,” instru­ments are incred­i­bly rich, some­times even to a fault, and every instru­ment, synth gen­er­ated or oth­er­wise has an uncanny level of depth to its sound. In short, the record­ing is excel­lent. A huge amount of care clearly went into con­fig­ur­ing the stereo, and the excel­lent pro­duc­tion job very evi­dently adds quite a bit to the qual­ity of the album.

Lead vocal­ist Jake Snider’s voice is less a strong or weak ele­ment of Minus the Bear’s music than it is sim­ply an ele­ment. Snider’s voice is prob­a­bly best described as “solid” - generic, but not bad. As such, Omni’s vocal ele­ment moves along with the music in a way that nei­ther detracts from nor builds onto the music. Occa­sional excep­tions, where a bit of color and char­ac­ter finds its way into Snider’s voice, do crop up, but they’re rare enough that the vocals are, on the whole, not very important.

Unfor­tu­nately, the lyrics of Omni are not quite so harm­less. Instead, their range is approx­i­mately between inane and irri­tat­ing. Snider repeats the worst lines five or more times, mak­ing their impact on the album as pro­foundly neg­a­tive as it pos­si­bly could be. For exam­ple: the line “When you hear this song / You’ll say you knew all along / You’re into me too” (repeated inces­santly on “Excuses”) is only roman­tic in the cloy­ing, Hallmark-card sense. After the sec­ond time it’s sung, it’s become annoy­ing. After the fourth (about five sec­onds from the end of the track), it’s man­aged to squan­der any cre­ativ­ity the instru­men­tals on that track displayed.

Omni is clearly not a per­fect album. Issues, pri­mar­ily lyri­cal, over­shadow much that is good on Omni, to enough of an extent that the end result is more mediocre than excel­lent. Still, it’s easy to see this album as gain­ing quite a bit of pop­u­lar­ity, per­haps most fit­tingly at dance par­ties, but def­i­nitely in other areas as well. There are not all that many areas that truly need to be improved upon for Minus the Bear to make a sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter sequel to Omni, and we cer­tainly hope they do.

This post is tagged 50-59, Minus the Bear