Art Bears Art Box CD

THE ART BOX contains HOPES & FEARS (1978)/WINTER SONGS (1979)/THE WORLD AS IT IS TODAY (1981) as well as ART BEARS REVISITED (2003) featuring mixes, remixes and re-workings of Art Bears tracks by various artists. Also includes a limited edition extra bonus disc with other remixes and rare Art Bears tracks.

The Art Bears were a thinking person's rock trio, unfortunately destined to be also-rans during the age of punk's ascendancy. But for an outfit operating at the margins of popular music for less than two years, it turns out that the Bears left quite an impressive legacy, as evidenced by The Art Box, a 2004 Recommended Records set celebrating the 25th anniversary of the band's inception. The collection is crammed with six CDs, not to mention a CD single and several booklets, that nearly burst the box's seams. Members of the Henry Cow/Slapp Happy aggregation, multi-instrumentalist Fred Frith, drummer Chris Cutler, and singer Dagmar Krause came together in 1978 and recorded three albums between the Art Bears' founding and breakup. These albums -- Hopes & Fears, Winter Songs, and The World as It Is Today -- are all here in remastered form (along with high-quality reproductions of the striking original cover art), as are two discs of remixes made by various artists over a six-year period, an odds'n'sods disc of live material and miscellanea, and a single ("Coda to Man and Boy") that duplicates a track from the odds'n'sods disc but is a nice souvenir anyway. The three original albums presented an adventurous mix of avant rock experimentalism, smatterings of noise and dissonance, British folk flavors, medieval imagery, and leftist, anti-corporate politics -- all distilled into the short formats of art songs with an occasional cabaret feel. In other words, not exactly Top 40 material.

The Art Bears' uniqueness is immediately apparent upon listening to the first of their albums, 1978's Hopes & Fears, like all three of their studio efforts engineered by Etienne Conod at Sunrise Studios outside Zurich. Hopes & Fears was a transitional LP, first intended as a Henry Cow album and including contributions from Cow members Tim Hodgkinson, Lindsay Cooper, and Georgie Born. The sonic palette is wide (including guitar, violin, viola, piano, harmonium, xylophone, and bass...and those are just the instruments played by Frith!), and there is a Cow-ish instrumental flavor throughout ("Terrain" is purely instrumental). But the most striking impression probably comes from Krause's vocalizing, about as antithetical to a conventional rock style as one could get. A powerful singer with a wide range, Krause could also be viewed as strident and severe in this setting (more In Praise of Learning than Casablanca Moon), informed by the seriousness of Cutler's "texts." The liner notes point out that the "texts" (Careful! These are not "lyrics"!) preceded the music, and although Cutler professes that "a listener can't know by listening whether the music or the text came first," in this case many might at least hazard a guess that the words were first through the door and the music followed closely behind.

Pared down to the core Krause/Frith/Cutler trio on 1979's Winter Songs, the Art Bears truly achieved a singular identity distinct from that of Henry Cow. Inspired by medieval stone carvings, Cutler's lyrics are brief and direct, hinting at eternal dark mysteries and matched by music ranging from the frantic ("Rats and Monkeys") to the absolutely haunting (the closing "Three Wheels"). This is a showcase for Frith's uncanny multi-instrumental skills and reveals how supremely inventive he could be even in the briefest of formats. And the group was arguably still on an upward trajectory when The World as It Is Today -- the soundtrack to a nig

The Art Bears: Dagmar Krause (vocals); Fred Frith (bass instrument); Chris Cutler (drums).

Personnel: Tim Hodgkinson (clarinet); Lindsay Cooper (bassoon); Georgie Born (background vocals).

Audio Remasterer: Bob Drake.