MP3: The Bear Quartet - Put me back together
If someone held a gun to my head and forced me to choose my one, and only one, absolute favorite Bear Quartet record, today I'd say it was "Angry brigade". It's not the most "Important" BQ album (with a capital I), but it is tremendously consistent the whole way through and the one record I find myself grabbing most often when I need my BQ fix. Opening track "Put me back together" for example is fantastic in that it has no chorus, just an endless recurring melody that builds and builds as the lyrics heap insult upon injury, compiling an endless pile of grief. My favorite line: "We were sure it wasn't loaded." Even without context, you can easily imagine all sorts of terrible scenarios which would result in such a, uh, punchline. "I was only seven and I got knifed" is also pretty good, even if just for being silly (and hey, that's Northern Sweden for you). So is "I tried to fix the TV" too, as again - it's easy to picture how that could go oh-so wrong. In the end, "The last I felt was rain." Ominous.
The Bear Quartet - Put me back together