[rating=7.00]
Whatever you might think, don’t call Lost Loves a B-Side collection. For far too long, Minus the Bear, the five lads from Seattle who specialize in under utilized guitar techniques and electronic washes, have unleashed album after album of insidious pop songs that can loop on repeat in your ears for days. Their last LP, Infinity Overhead, was their biggest success in terms of chart rankings, though Minus the Bear have never really been one to pursue the prize of Billboard recognition. Their catalog suggests they follow their muses wherever they lead, from beer commercial staging to dirty bathrooms filled with white powder. Come along with them for consistency, but stay for the pseudo-prog leanings of their dual guitar attack.
The musical glue that has always kept Minus the Bear from coming unhinged will always be their album sequencing. In an era of 30-second clips and incessant streaming, Minus the Bear still believe in the product and picture of an LP as a whole experience. It’s on display from their earliest EPs and figures especially well into Lost Loves.
Lost Loves is a collection of tracks that didn’t make the cut for their previous LPs. Songs the band clearly still “love” but simply could not force into the sequence of their prior LPs. Listening to Lost Loves, however, it’s tough to justify where these tracks could have been squeezed in. “Patiently Waiting” likely ended up on the cutting room floor from the Omni sessions; “Electric Rainbow,” with its lyrical leaning of a drug-deal gone bad could have squared Menos El Oso up around the edges; and “Surf N Turf,”despite it’s sunny title, is remote and distant, a contender for residency on Planet Of Ice. “Where do these cliffs come from? They keep on lining up … the wind is moving you further,” is how lead singer Jake Snider echoes the spatial distance of that album, and the slick guitars and drum breaks create a disjointed feeling of isolation. Which is to say, it sounds like vintage Minus the Bear post-Menos El Oso, a terrain where the band decided to stretch their songwriting abilities and their musicianship.
Even though it has never been explicit, Minus the Bear always tread conceptual lines within albums. Lyrically, the band focuses on themes of human connection, disjointed love affairs, and the cruelty the humans are capable of. (The word “connect” shows up a lot on Lost Loves, especially on the brutal “Cat Calls and Ill Means.”) All of this is a far cry from a band who titled their first EPs, This Is What I Know About Being Gigantic and Bands Like It When You Yell Yar at Them. Minus the Bear scrapped all the snark for a bit of wizened maturity, a shift that is complicated to pull off for normally fickle audiences. But Lost Loves, despite a few misses like “Patiently Waiting” and “Invented Memory” which show that the band haven’t quite nailed down the female perspective, is a sweet pill to swallow, an LP with no strings attached that hangs together like a greatest hits collection that might-have-been. “Leave it to the lucky ones,” is the final refrain on Lost Loves’ final song,“The Lucky Ones.” For fans, who are surely the lucky ones in this case, Lost Loves is everything we’ve come to expect; for everyone else, Lost Loves can be your map through the previous destinations of the band; their worlds are well worth the time to get lost in.
