Bear In Heaven – Beast Rest Forth Mouth (2009) [Hometapes] // Grade: A

If you’ve ever been on a road trip—or better yet, a tour—you know something of how wistful and haunted a long drive can get. Especially at night, when it’s all flashing lights and dark expanse—but hang on. That’s the second half of Beast Rest Forth Mouth. We’re not there yet. First, it’s epic and spacious; a hundred pastures melting into cities melting into pastures. Maybe it’s just that I’m on the road as I write this, but I’ve never heard an album that epitomizes the experience more.

You could call Beast Rest Forth Mouth art-rock, but that wouldn’t get to the heart of it. Honestly, no predetermined genre can get to the heart of Bear In Heaven, unless you combine indie-pop, new-wave, industrial, shoegaze and psych into a big mess that still won’t capture the sheer largeness of it (think 4AD by way of arena). It’s enough to know that the name Bear In Heaven does not suggest, even in the slightest, what the band sounds like, and that Beast Rest Forth Mouth—follow-up to 2007′s Red Bloom Of The Bloom—rambles forward like a cross-country drive, infinite and constantly changing. Stompy opener “Beast In Peace” (featuring a drum-circle climax that somehow doesn’t sound like Rusted Root) and the psych-disco “Wholehearted Mess” tumble through the album’s energetic first half, eventually settling into the Moroder-meets-Kraftwerk “Lovesick Teenagers”—the album’s twilight, if it has such a thing; a wistful, forlorn end to a too-long day of driving.

And then it’s night. Haunted, manic, sleepless night. “Drug A Wheel” and “Deafening Love”—my absolute favorites and by far the most psychedelic—slow down to a series of shifty-eyed glitches, with Jon Philpot’s voice moving from possessed, cultish chants to an almost Bjork-like yowl. It’s a perfect contrast to (and seamless transition from) the bright, open space of the first five-or-so songs, and ultimately what makes them all the more stunning on a second listen. Plus, with the entire thing clocking in at just under 41 minutes, there’s never a moment where all the expanse gets to be too much; it ends just when you need it to, unlike those particularly rough tours that, peaceful or not, seem to go on forever. Hands down one of the best albums of the year.

- Rue Sauvage