Bear In Heaven is an experimental indie-rock band from Brooklyn, New York whose latest album Beast Rest Forth Mouth was recently released to significant critical acclaim, even receiving Pitchfork’s much-coveted ‘Best New Music’ designation. After being personally blown away by the album, I rushed to get an interview with frontman Jon Philpot to find out how Bear In Heaven began and how it feels now to be in a rising indie band. The interview was conducted just a couple days after the Pitchfork review.
Marc Z Grub, PopWreckoning: So tell me about your week, Jon.
Jon Philpot, Bear In Heaven: My week? My week has been pretty crazy.Lots of interviews with web people and people from magazines and also lots of emails from people in Europe, which is cool.
MG: Was it like the Pitchfork review went up and suddenly the phone started ringing?
JP: Essentially, yes. I am as amazed as anybody about how incredibly powerful Pitchfork is. And I’m happy to have received the good side of it. It’s really cool. I never knew it existed like this.
MG: Yeah, this sort of ‘OMG, Pitchfork is so powerful!’ thing keeps coming up with bands I talk to. It’s pretty amazing. So, this [album, Beast Rest Forth Mouth] is your second album, right?
JP: This is our second full-length record and we also have an EP that I did on my own way back before any of the guys that are in the band were presently in the band. And there’s also a dance EP we made for this record out of [the song] “Wholehearted Mess.”
MG: So can you tell me how Bear In Heaven originated?
JP: It started basically with just me. I was making bedroom-style music but kind of pushing it a little as far as what I was trying to record. Then people kind of got excited about stuff that I was doing and then I got a record out – that little EP I was telling you about – called Tunes Nextdoor To Songs. And then the guys joined the band: the guys that are in the band presently. We lost two members – one is David Daniell, who’s actually gone on to a really successful solo experimental guitar kind of career. He moved to Chicago and started doing that. And then the other fellow is James Elliott and he played with School Of Seven Bells for a while. I think he actually recorded on their Alpinisms record and then he also has the really fruitful kind of awkward dance music project that he’s doing too [ed. Ateleia]. And then the four of us that are left just kind of kept going.
MG: And how did the four of you get together?
JP: [Keyboardist/Guitarist] Sadek (Bazarra) and I are friends from Atlanta. We actually dated the same girl, that’s how we know each other, oddly enough. Not at the same time though, at different times. [Guitarist] Adam (Wills) and I worked together at a studio, at this kind of video-making studio and then when I moved up to New York, he moved up kind of shortly after and we just maintained the friendship. And [drummer] Joe [Stickney] and Adam actually went to school together, so that’s how those two guys knew each other. And then we just kind of started playing altogether. Actually, we got a practice space and it was all the people that I told you about, minus Joe, and we were playing music without a drummer for like, a long while. And that was kind of weird but we were doing it, we were playing. And then Joe came in and we were like, “oh, now we’re a band.”
MG: Has having a full band changed the way that you write and changed the way that Bear In Heaven sounds?
JP: Yeah, it did, I mean it limited the palette in like a good way because before it was like you’re just making music and you think about, “oh, what sound could I put here” or, “what sound could I put there” and “do I know anybody who plays cello or harp or trumpet or something” and you just put all those people on the record because that’s what was going on. And your pallet is super wide or at least my pallet was super wide, you know, I knew all these people doing different stuff.
Now that we’re like a band and want to make music that reflects what we’re doing live, it’s limited the palette and made us sort of more cohesive I think. But we still have these weird elements of what I was doing in the past or something. Like when we started playing altogether, we were playing the songs I had recorded on my own. We were kind of trying to translate them in a weird way. We had synthesizers and samplers and we were trying to translate these weird very personal-time songs, none of the timing was in any kind of normal counts or anything like that. It was basically like a cluster fuck. But that, I think, that kind of helped us learn to do things more efficiently, but also kind of keeping some of the weird ridiculousness that I guess I was doing on my own. Basically, I didn’t really know what I was doing: just kind of experimenting. 
MG: I was trying to think about how to describe your guys’ sounds in terms of influences or likenesses to other bands and I was having a really hard time doing it. Where would you say the Bear In Heaven-sound comes from?
JP: There are so many things that have shaped [the sound]. I guess Talk Talk was a really big influence at one point; those guys were making really cool music. I think everybody in the band would say something different though. I really like Jerry Butler. You know, it’s been funny reading people trying to figure out what we’re doing and we’re not trying to do a thing that sounds like something else, we’re just doing our thing. Does that make sense?
MG: It does, because you guys really do not sound like any one other band or thing in particular. I thought you guys definitely sounded very 2009, but I couldn’t point to any one band or movement in particular and say like, “They’re trying to do that.”
JP: Yeah, like it’s not because we don’t want to. I mean, like we know we sound like whatever else is going on, there is definitely that, [but] there’s not really a point in trying to be like another modern band necessarily. We’re just trying to do what we do naturally and [we’ve been] kind of way under the radar for a long time so we just kind of kept doing what we were doing. A lot of times we’ve failed. We’ve had a lot of failures and also some minor successes here and there and we’ve made friendships in the music community that we value. We’ve been around playing for about five years, but I don’t know. I heard one guy on Facebook or Twitter or something compared us to Moroder and Toto.
MG: Giorgio Moroder?
JP: Yeah. (Laughs)
MG: I guess that’s not a horrible comparison, but any band that I’d try to compare you to, it would be like, “not reeeeaaaallllyyyy.”
JP: Yeah, we come from such a wide background I guess. I mean all of us independently come from such a wide listening background, it’s stuff that it’s just gotten in our brains and we don’t even know what the hell it is anymore. There’s a lot of stuff that I really like, like you can definitely put Jerry Butler and Talk Talk down there, those guys are great. But if you talk to Adam he might tell you there’s some RnB thing that just hit him hard or something like that. Oh, and Prince. Prince is great.
MG: You all said you come from different background, what kind of background would you say you come from?
JP: Musically, uh– a late bloomer. I didn’t start playing music until late in the game, but when I did start playing I was really into minimalism and experimental music and that kind of stuff. Not necessarily like pop tunes, though strangely, the older I get the more I really like pop music and rock. Don’t get me wrong though, I’ll still listen to some ‘out’ electronic shit and I think that that’s kind of where my heart will always be. I definitely have to say when I heard about Tony Conrad and that band AMM, I was like, “This is music?” I mean, it was confusing that that could actually be music.
MG: How old were you when you started playing music?
JP: I probably was 19, maybe.
MG: How old are you now?
JP: I’m old. It’s kind of funny. I’m 35.
MG: Oh wow, it took a long time to get to ‘Best New Music,’ but you got there.
JP: (Laughs) Yeah, yeah, I guess so. I mean I’ve been in other projects that have kind of just totally gone under the radar and weren’t even for this particular crowd at all.
MG: You said you guys had a lot of failures, could you tell me about maybe about a couple of your massive failures?
JP: Well, as far as live shows go, one of the bigger failures we had was when we headlined at The Knitting Factory. That was a terrible show. It was one of those shows that we were like, “Jesus Christ, are we gonna continue this?” But we pushed through, thankfully. We ended up having a good show a couple weeks after that. But that show in particular was terrible. It was the night of the Palin-Biden presidential debate and everybody’s eyes were glued on the television. Nobody came out to that show, maybe five people in total. It was a pretty rough experience. And then I guess, you know, not to put any hate on the last record we did (Red Bloom Of The Boom), but we were just making music that we kind of had to get it out, get it out of our system. These like long songs and they were not necessarily for everybody-
MG: Pitchfork still gave you a good review on that one though, they gave you like a 7.8, which is pretty legit.
JP: Yeah, yeah, no, we were really gracious that we got that. That actually helped too. But you know, that record was more of, like, we just had to get that record out of us. And it was good that we did. And it’s weird whenever I listen to it, there’s like so much space and we just were taking our time. But in this climate, it seems like the attention span just isn’t there on a record. All the songs that you hear on this record were at one point over seven minutes so we’ve cut it back and you know, we’re trying in a way to make it fun for us and fun for the audience. We’ve definitely learned a lot over the course of trying to make these songs the way that we want to make them and the way that we do make them.
MG: And how else is this album different from the last one?
JP: It’s just more ‘honed in’ on what it is we’re doing. I think we are actually ‘figuring it out.’ We’re figuring out our process; we’re figuring out our systems. We’re kind of a nerdy band a little bit, we’re kind of pecky, but it’s been kind of fun, it really has and it opens us up to doing different sounding stuff, I think. We want to make stuff that not just us would enjoy.
MG: So what’s next for Bear In Heaven? What are you guys feeling in terms of your next step?
JP: Music videos and then going on tour as much as we can. And between all that, just kind of get back to writing and stuff like that, which is cool. We’ve always had more songs written and recorded than are out so we finally caught up with ourselves. [We can finally] take the stuff – like a freakin’ hard-drive full of sketches – and be like “alright, those ten, make something.”
MG: Are you feeling like you’re going to be making any stylistic changes?
JP: I don’t know, we’ll just feel it out. We’ve not like had a plan like that ever, so we’ll keep hopefully just stumbling along. Maybe we’ll land on something good.
Bear In Heaven: website | myspace
In Washington last year, two adjacent businesses on H Street Northeast, the tiny live music venue Red and Black Bar and the burlesque house Palace of Wonders joined forces to create a combined venue, the Red Palace. I’d seen some shows at the Red and Black and while it was intimate, the ambiance was nothing to write home about. The new and improved Red Palace, I am happy to report, is a revelation. The performance space is on the top floor of the place and is as intimate as my other favorite venue in the city, DC9 (no wonder, it’s owned by the same folks) and it cleans up real nice. For my first show at Red Palace, I was there Saturday night to see the band who provided my best gig of 2010, the Postelles of New York City.
Fox), commenting how much he loved Washington, saying, “my favorite [thing to see in DC] is the Washington Monument, because everyone knows what it looks like, no dicking around.” Laughter.
Snowmine, the other opener, is a Brooklyn psych pop band. When I think of “Brooklyn” and “psych pop” I think of Bear in Heaven. Similar, but Snowmine has a more tropical vibe. Think Bear in Heaven meets Cut Copy. If Jurassic Park had a house band, it would sound like Snowmine. Their first track, “Danger in the Snow!”, began with prehistoric programmed rumblings. But most of their songs involve maraca and tambourine shaking and big beats, and I also thought of the new wave of Men at Work and Toto‘s “Africa” as possible reference points. Cool vibe. I was definitely into the more upbeat numbers like “Penny” and “The Hill.” They also have an album coming out soon, called Laminate Pink Animal. Check ‘em out.
It’s hard for me to comprehend that the guys of the Postelles are barely into their twenties. I’ve seen them three times now (once, opening for Hockey, and twice as a headliner), and they play like seasoned veterans. It may be because of the many times they’ve played in our town, they always get an amazing reception, and who doesn’t play a great show when you have a great audience? Their debut album has been delayed for a long while but rumor has it that it will finally be released in April; physical copies of The Postelles were available at the DC show.
