This Old Story: Celebrating 10 years of Minus The Bear's Menos El Oso

"Midnight on a beach in the Mediterranean and I miss you, even here, taking it all in". As a 15-year-old living in the suburbs of Southern England, wasting away the hours on Myspace instead of homework, the romance and mystery in these opening lyrics of the dazzling “Pachuca Sunrise” could not have been further from the reality of life. And yet, there I was, trawling through that endless trail of my favourite bands’ ‘Top Friends’ - if you know, you know - when I felt those powerfully emotive lyrics and warm, bathing guitar tones cover me and take me to a place I had not been to before.

Though its title lacked originality - it’s simply the band’s name expressed in Spanish - Menos El Oso was one of the most exciting things I had ever heard, painting vivid vignettes onto a backdrop of music that was somehow at once ambient and graceful yet melodic and exerting.

First released in 2005 by Suicide Squeeze Records, the record followed Highly Refined Pirates, the band’s first full-length three years earlier. Many find this debut to be the band’s magnum opus, shadowing successive releases with its boomier production and more playful vibe. To be sure, in the making of Menos El Oso, the band opted for a richer and crisper sound, and dropped the more impulsive, esoteric song titles (“Thanks For The Killer Game Of Crisco Twister”, to name but one). But for many of my generation, Menos El Oso provided a sort of existential dreamland, where the issues and pressures of adult life were treated with a profound beauty and delicacy, an almost youthful perspective, and it became then a perfect soundtrack to the transitional phase of late-teenhood. Through both its jubilant and melancholy moments, it was always intellectually stimulating; indeed, musically it was truly galvanising, propelling me into a new world of intelligent, or ‘cerebral’, rock music.

In hindsight, some of the messages behind vocalist Jake Snider’s lyrics are quite simple. In album opener “The Game Needed Me”, Snider laments about the vacuity of working life: “What does it cost for this life of excess / Would you ever miss your desk’s caress?” It’s a moment we must all face, judging the value of our aspirations and what we’re willing to sacrifice for them, and when those tightly locked drums and guitar glitches pound behind these words, you really feel the question knocking on the door, demanding an answer in that very moment.

At other times, however, the border between reality and fiction becomes blurred, forcing Snider to ask: “Is this a dream? / You ask and I don’t say anything / ‘Cus this may be a dream”. In “Memphis & 53rd”, for example, we’re pulled into a cinematic thriller: “That night we lay on the floor of the desert / But I could barely sleep / Yeah I had this dream / There was a man in a black car / With a man in the back seat / And I woke up in a cold sweat / With her lying next to me”. Abrasive, staccato chords give an edge to its fast-paced ending, which suddenly cuts out to mirror Snider’s return to consciousness.

Minus The Bear are masters of dramatic endings - “Drilling” has three of them - and there’s certainly a cinematic vividness to the record. In “El Torrent”, we are given a vignette of a police officer disturbed by the death of a young girl because he sees in her a likeliness to his own daughter: “Please let my girl go / Without knowing what I know / Don’t let her read this day on my face when I come home”. Sonically it’s one of the most gentle tracks, although even here drummer Erin Tate can’t drop his hunger for intricate snare work which seems insatiable on this album.

It’s not all dark, though. At times the band returns to the joviality of youth, aptly captured in “Hooray”, where upon the first snowfall of winter, "Men become boys again". Its verses probably contain the most beautiful melodies of the album, which sweetly scored the very few ‘snow days’ we had growing up in the UK.

Despite the cold, crispy tones of “Hooray”, I always saw Menos El Oso as the summery precursor to its 2007 follow up, Planet of Ice. In “Pachuca Sunrise”, Snider’s poetic flare is at its best as he feels the longing for his lover in spite of his enchanting surroundings: “The sand’s silver carries the moon on its shoulders / Is it possible to put this night to tune and give it to you?”. But it would be an injustice here to forget guitarist Dave Knudson’s pivotal role in the creation of this radiance. With his innovative use of multiple Line 6 DL-4 pedals, Knudson creates a whirl of delayed, reversed, and enhanced guitar phases; it’s truly a sight to behold live. The brilliance of this track is in its balance; its atmosphere is spectacularly moving but not saccharine, it is both calming and exhilarating. Despite the feeling of longing that it expresses, it is a song that makes you feel alive, and for that it is entirely scintillating.

As Pitchfork’s Adam Moerder noted in his (not entirely flattering) review at the time, the instrumentation of Menos El Oso steps up more than in previous releases to carry more responsibility for the melody, and I think this is key to its importance. Track after track, melody reigns supreme, nurturing the band’s pop sensibilities whilst never abandoning the technical intricacies that have since become slightly sidelined. For me and many others, the record’s concordance of twiddly guitar melodies and ruthlessly interesting rhythms unlocked a door into a world of ‘math’ and/or ‘intelligent’ rock which would revolutionise the way I approached music.

In London, approaching the end of the Menos El Oso tenth anniversary tour this January, the band played the record from start to finish to a packed out Electric Ballroom. A heckler was jokingly berated by Snider for requesting the next song, noting that "you can almost with a hundred percent accuracy predict the next song!" They were in good spirits, and their execution was tight, impressively so on tracks such as “El Torrente” which never got much stage-time originally. Just down the road was The Camden Underworld, where the band first toured the record back in 2005.

Quite aptly, Snider introduced us to their fresh-faced new drummer, replacing founding member Tate, who left the band at the beginning of last year. "This guy was 15 when the record came out", we were told.

While we can’t all grow up and join our favourite bands that we listened to growing up, we can take something from their albums that defined us. From Menos El Oso, I've learnt to see the beauty in the pangs of longing, in the pressures of work, in the fear of loss. After all, "this is the difference between living and not living".

The reissue of Menos El Oso is available now in limited supply via Suicide Squeeze.