Bear in Heaven @ The Lexington - 20 April 2010

I fear for my beloved instrument. In the hey days of punk, grunge, or any rock n roll, the bass was the lynchpin of the band. You couldn’t put a price on someone who could pump out a deep groove for the rest to build themselves around. I get the faint sniff that nowadays it’s becoming a peripheral instrument. More and more, I’ll go and watch a band and see the bass passed around guitarists and keyboardists like an unwanted child of a divorced family at Christmas. The result is more often than not a show that lacks any real grunt.

It was no more evident than tonight at the Lexington. Bear in Heaven, who hail from Brooklyn but spent the last 50 hours trying to negotiate a flight ban into the UK, are an act for the noughties – plenty of synths, plenty of fast beats, plenty of high-pitched vocals. Don’t get me wrong, they show incredible potential. I don’t profess to be hugely au fait with them, but I was taken with a number of their tunes tonight. They create great energy, and know the right moments to break down the beats.

But one thing in particular bugged me: neither guitarist nor vocalist seemed to really know how to get the most out of the bass. The lines they played were fine – even impressive – but being guitarists at heart they didn’t move away from the close frets at the higher end. They were reticent to walk their fingers down the neck to find the real impact of the instrument. At times, it was even discarded altogether.

The result was a show that lacked a pulse. It seemed there was nothing gluing the three of them together, no grunt to really drive the building crescendos home. My ears hurt from the abundance of treble that even the drums seemed to contribute to.
It’s a problem easily fixed. The beauty of a great bassist is that they don’t garner the attention of the crowd in the way a front man does. You can sit them in the corner and they know their job is to look after the basics. Bear in Heaven would benefit hugely from the services of a four-stringed specialist.