Back To The Future: Bearsuit

Norwich’s Bearsuit are one of those bands that have always seemed to receive much critical acclaim, ranging from numerous blogs to the championing of the late John Peel. While they have had a musical influential on many bands currently coming through the indie underground like Los Campesinos!. Yet they so far have remained a cult band but after listening to their third album ‘OH:IO’ it’s easy to assume that they will move away from this slightly and gain some more of the widespread attention which they whole heartedly deserve.     

From the very start one word has haunted them more than any other; it seems that when anybody starts talking about them the word twee would surely be mentioned not long after. The overwhelming census amongst the members is that this tag has hindered them, especially as the label may have put people off from investigating their music. Matt expresses that he thinks “twee has become a general term of abuse a lot like indie and it shouldn’t be necessarily.” But this tweeness wasn’t something that was deliberate. Lisa explains that she thinks that Bearsuit “used to sound really twee because we weren’t good at playing we sounded really shambolic, we didn’t mean to be we just couldn’t do it very well.” While Jan expresses that the tag is something they are looking to distance themselves from, saying: “I think it helped us in the beginning when we were slightly more twee but we’ve moved on since that, the nice songs haven’t got more twee just gone more orchestral, bigger and epic. They’ve lost that tweeness”
 
Their latest album has progressed musically from their first but still retains a level of charm and their trademark idiosyncrasies. Songs about top less female boxers rub shoulders with songs about colonising the solar system. Lisa describes the songs on this album as being “More bear less suit, the love songs are really like sweet songs, more sweeter and more lush and orchestral, the more heavy dirty songs are more heavy, dirty and more shouty”. Jan says that part of this change was due to them having “more time to think about what we wanted to do, we recorded a few more songs than we needed so we could cherry pick the best ones.” While Lisa explains that time has also played a key factor in the bands progression by explaining that previous album release 'Team Ping Ping' "was the first thing we ever did, before we barely played any gigs or anything so it’s changed really a lot, that was literally like 5 or 6 years ago that we recorded that but it was only out recently, we like to think we have got a lot better.”