Release Date: August 5, 2011
Boy and Bear is an indie-folk quintet from Sydney. They’ve been working together since 2009, but the band has seen very little hype, which is too bad because recently released debut album, Moonfire, is pretty great.
Despite this being the first album, the band sounds like it’s been together forever. No song better demonstrates this than Moonfire’s stellar intro track, “Lordy May.” “Lordy May” starts off simple, with just some drum skins, then light acoustic guitar, and eventually pieces together a number of elements until the song is transformed from its minimalistic beginning into something large and grand. By the end of the song, the five-piece melds together perfectly.
The pounding, tribal drums accentuate driving bass riffs and lead singer Dave Hosking’s rich, full vocals power the song to its somber conclusion. “When I come to my end some day/Will I find myself sitting at some golden gate?/Or will it all just float away?/My end some day,” Hosking sings. Although the subject matter is grave, the song remains high-energy and is worth a number of repeat listens.
As the album continues, the band begins to develop a very solid style: standard indie folk augmented by fuzzy but unobtrusive alt-rock guitars, and prominent, bouncing bass riffs. Songs are usually catchy, but the hooks don’t feel cheap, and the band manages to take a few played-out elements and make them work without being cheesy (check for the way the band uses looped whistling to intro and outro the song “Part Time Believer”; it’s actually good). Vocal harmonizing is common, but it isn’t abused and is consistently well done. All in all, it’s a sound that most will have heard before, but it’s both endearing and dependable and it works out excellently for the album and the band.
Highlights other than “Lordy May” include “Golden Jalibee,” whose buzzing electric guitars drive an upbeat jam, and “House and Farm,” which starts with little more than a plodding acoustic guitar but piles on layers (including some mandolin) until it becomes grandiose, almost epic. The album also has two very short intermission tracks, “Percy Warner Park,” where Hosking wails and banjos twang, and “The Village,” which sounds like it’s ripped from an Iron and Wine album. Overall, the album flows remarkably well, is thematically and stylistic congruent, and manages to have fun within the sometimes suffocatingly rigid genre of folk.
The only major complaint to be made about the album is that the end drags a little compared with the higher energy beginning and middle.
The last few songs, namely “Beach” and “Big Man,” slow down a little too much and don’t really do justice to the driven early half of the record.
Still, that one complaint doesn’t really amount to much, and Moonfire ends up being a very well-constructed indie-folk rock album that revels in a big, full sound and manages to deliver it well.
Boy and Bear – Moonfire tracklist:
- “Lordy May”
- “Feeding Line”
- “Milk and Sticks”
- “Part Time Believer”
- “My Only One”
- “Percy Warner Park”
- “Golden Jubilee”
- “House and Farm”
- “The Village”
- “Beach”
- “Big Man”
