Guidon Bear are something of a supergroup, bringing together three veterans of Olympia’s 90s scene—lead Mary Water (Little Red Car Wreck), drummer/multi-instrumentalist Pat Maley (Lois, Courtney Love) and synth player E. Michael Bradley. The band’s website has a more comprehensive (and frankly, absurd) bio, explaining how the trio’s day jobs as a middle school teacher, therapeutic grocer, and computer programmer are forgotten twice a week when “Mary and Michael sneak into Pat’s garage and play music as loudly as possible in an attempt to lure Pat out from his home laboratory where he recently discovered a new element after spilling nail polish onto cello bow rosin.”
Anyway, the result of all that is some pretty stellar indie pop, the kind of stuff that put Olympia on the map way back when. Their new album Downwardly Mobile: Steel Accelerator, sees Guidon Bear combine this pop writing wizardry with the woes and anxieties of adult life in the twenty-first century, what label Antiquated Future Records describe as “infectious and subtly complex pop songs about real-life nightmares, boot camps, late bills, and scraping by.” Take ‘Washing Machine’, an indie pop song that feels sharp and slick and snappy, all skittering drums and restrained guitar. The real star is Waters, delivering wry lyrics about the pains of living in rented homes (e.g.”our landlord’s carpet’s frighteningly pristine”) with a kind of simmering frustration.
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This doesn’t mean the writing lacks invention. “What do you say when gravity up and walks away?” asks opener ‘Microgravity’, probably the most heartfelt speculative, borderline sci-fi pop song of the year, even if Waters’s words are more metaphorical than literal. It’s just one example of the unique lyricism on display, everyday observations married with the slightly absurd to capture a world that’s far more familiar than some grey hyperrealist description. The chorus on ‘Mailbox’ is another good example, mapping an olfactory route from home to a mailbox.
I smell gasoline walking to the mailbox with you,
I smell candy canes walking to the mailbox with you,
I smell chemicals walking to the mailbox with you,
but there’s no gas station, no Santa Claus, there’s no swimming pool here
Refreshingly, Downwardly Mobile: Steel Accelerator works really well as a cohesive whole, something that doesn’t seem such a concern in most streaming-era indie pop. Every other track is a short instrumental (simply named A, B, C, etc), which rather than cheap filler, wraps the longer songs in a bed of texture and tone. Think of it as the sonic soil from which the fruit-bearing plants spring in a neat row.
But as is often the case in nature, these plants have sharp thorns as well as moreish sweetness. With its off-kilter synth line and chipper xylophone, ‘Go Away’ is the definition of bittersweet indie pop. (“You can cry after lights out” songs Waters), while final song proper, ‘Magellanic Cloud’, has an oddly captivating stuttering rhythm that blossoms into a soaring chorus
Downwardly Mobile: Steel Accelerator is out now via Antiquated Future Records and you can grab it now from Bandcamp.