This review of the avant-rock-anarcho-commie UK band, the Art Bears’ 1981 album, “The World As It Is Today” was printed in Events, a xeroxed free handout that listed the New Wave (the term still referred to the bands and music boiling underground in the wake of the late Seventies Punk explosion, and not to the Haircut 100 and Kajagoogoo commercial pablum it became) shows coming up at the handful of venues that, in 1981, would take a chance on this kind of scandalous music.
For this issue, August 1981, just short of 44 years ago, and so barely after the invention of electricity, there are only 3 clubs listed, two in Denver and one in Boulder: Walabi’s (a dive bar just off Ellsworth on Broadway); Four Mile House (in the sticks at Leetsdale and Cherry); and the legendary Blue Note in Boulder.
Such was the paucity of New Wave bands and the places they could strut their stuff on stage in Denver in the early Eighties: if you weren’t playing Top 40 or Classic Rock or Country Rock, you were pretty much stuck playing house parties and backyard festivals.
Of course, our motives, Wax Trax’s motives, were not entirely pure. In the spirit of unfettered Capitalism, we also included mentions of some items you could come down to the store and spend your hard earned money on: and so we nodded at the good Art Bears.
Anyway, this Art Bears review is an example of what we thought you should give a listen to instead of Journey, REO Speedwagon and Foreigner. It probably doesn’t need pointing out that we convinced very few.
It didn’t matter.
The music did.
The Art Bears – The World as it is Today LP (Recommended Records, 1981)
[Originally published in Events magazine in August 1981]
The Art Bears are like nothing else you have ever heard or are likely to hear again. This is a music alive with the tensions of growth and decay, luxury and need, irony and rage.
The lyrics are in the best tradition of the gnomic verse of William Blake: clean, bare, reductive, and yet such that a mere touch makes them unfold and, like a rose of utter darkness, petal upon petal of image and reference shudders along the spine carrying a weight of rage and sorrow for the degradation of man in society.
Consider, for example, the compactness, the bitter irony of the opening lines to “Gold” from their 1978 LP, Winter Songs: “I was born in the earth / out of Fire and Flood. / Owned men mined me/and out of their lives all / my value derived / and out of their deaths / my authority.” This is a brilliant miniature, a whole lesson in economy, human and inhuman, in a few lines, an alchemy of words transmuting wisdom and anger into art.
The new LP, “The World as it is Today,” continues this exploration of values and their effects on men. Consider “Law”: “I saw our masters / sat to dine / bloated on Liberty, / yours and mine / I asked, is there no portion for the poor? / they answered, / surely / and belched up / the law.” Again and again, the lyrics come to grips with the structure of values and mores by which men are caged by their own best intentions: Yes, I want to be good, to obey the law, to be productive but what if all the rules for doing things are actually a hidden enslavement, an encoded process of use sliding into uselessness. We barter our youth, our energy, our nerve for a roof and a paycheck. It is not wrong to want (or to have) shelter and security – it is wrong to make the price of those things our very blood and bone, our very lives.
These lyrics are set in a quirky, gnarled and grating music that allows no lull, no pleasure, no ease — it is The Terror working all its tiny splinters of fear and dread thru the skin and in the Body Politic.
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