Aural Aggravation

Bearsuit Records – 31st May 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

There was a time – not so long ago – when I would come home from work and struggle to nudge the front door open with my shoulder for the mountain of CDs that had been dropped through my letterbox, along with the occasional ‘sorry we missed you’ card telling me I had a parcel at the depot awaiting collection or to arrange redelivery, and more often than not it would be some vinyl, and all of it promo material for review. I had a box – which was initially a shoebox, but later replaced with something larger – which was my ‘to-review’ box, after the pile kept falling over once it reached an unsustainable height. It was a storage nightmare, and I still have boxes containing quite literally thousands of promo CDs with press releases folded up with them, in boxes in the walk-in cupboard and the end of my office, which is, in truth, too stuffed with boxes of CDs to squeeze more than a toe into, rather than actually walk in.

Working in an office as I did then – rather than at home – I would take a bundle of CDs in a jiffy in my bag, and sit and listen to them as I worked. It beat enduring the often moronic drone of the people around me, and I’d tap out notes which I’d email home to myself to flesh out into full reviews in the evening.

My working method has changed rather since then, and while still working the dayjob, I’ve barely set foot in an office other than the one in the back bedroom of my house since lockdown. I haven’t received stacks of CDs in the post for a similar length of time, if not longer. For all of practical issues around the stacks of CDs, I do kinda miss it, and this is one of the reasons I always get a thrill at the arrival of a disc in the mail from Dave Hillary, who runs Bearsuit Records. The other, and not insignificant reason I always get a thrill at the arrival of a disc in the mail from Dave is that I’m eager to discover what mad genius work the label’s releasing next. I enjoy slipping the disc in the external CD drive I have attached to my laptop and soaking in the strangeness that spills from my speakers: I’m never disappointed.

I love the fact that I still get CDs in the mail, with promo cards and handwritten notes and so on, from Bearsuit, not just because of the joy of the physicality and the personal touch, but because it’s emblematic of the label as an entity. It does what it does, regardless of whatever else is happening, and it releases music the likes of which you simply won’t find anywhere else.

Eamon the Destroyer is a classic case in point. Another typically enigmatic artist in the Bearsuit tradition, Eamon the Destroyer has enjoyed a great run of releases to date. Debut album A Small Blue Car was a work of fuzzy, minimalist , downtempo brilliance. A sad, introspective work, it was unexpectedly touching for something so overtly odd, and follow-up We’ll Be Piranhas pushed further into forging songs that straddled the dreamlike and the nightmarish, a disorientating, discombobulating work that delved deep into the psyche in a way that felt like invisible fingers creeping inside the cranium and directly massaging the brain.

And now we come to the more or less obligatory counterpart release. Instead of the standard and expected remix EP, Alternative Piranhas gives us outtakes alternative takes of tracks from the album. A cynical voice might ask why they didn’t make the album cut, but there are myriad valid reasons: an album need to cohere and sometimes even the best tunes don’t fit with the flow, and similarly, the mood of one take or mix may in fact be better objectively, but not quite sit with the context.

And so it is with the five tracks here. All five appeared on We’ll Be Piranhas. While exactly the same length as its album counterpart, ‘A Pewter Wolf’ presents a quite different mix: the organ is much more boomy, more ‘churchy’ than on the album version, while the guitar sounds, almost buried on the album blurred and hazed out low in the mix, are more up-front and gritty here.

The version of ‘Rope’ on Alternate Piranhas seems to be in a different key, and is much grainer, murkier and messier than the more polished album take, and it’s more abrasive, more aggressive, with the vocals more up-front, and the result is that I found myself hearing thee song anew and soaking in the anger which permeates it, less obviously on the other version, tempered by the more mellow mix.

Overall, the versions on Alternate Piranhas are rougher, less ‘produced’, and it’s not difficult to discern why the versions chosen for the album were the ones they were. The album worked as a cohesive set, with an even, smoothed-out sound – well, in context – but Alternative Piranhas provides an insight into the process, which is never more apparent than on ‘The Choirmaster’. It’s not radically different… but it is different, while the alternative take of ‘My Stars’ is half the length of thee album and feels like a sketched-out demo. But again, it possesses qualities absent from the album version, just as the album version has elements which are absent here, including another five minutes of sound.

Alternate Piranhas feels more overtly rock than its progenitor, and perhaps it is, but above all, it’s a source of enjoyment to revisit these songs from a different perspective.

AA