Menos El Oso Turns 20

Someone listened to “Booyah Achieved” and A. gave Minus the Bear a bigger recording budget and B. told them to knock it off with the song titles. The blueprint that Gigantic provided, hairpin turns on the drums, tapping guitars, Snider’s surfer-bro affectations, are all over Menos El Oso, but three years of writing and touring made Minus the Bear a sleeker machine. This suited everyone, but especially Knudson, well. He was one of many math-rock adjacent guitarists who seemed to delight in making his guitar sound like anything but a guitar. But unlike Ian Williams of Don Cabollero who seemed to resent the idea of rock as a genre, Knudson was still enamored with the Hendrixness of it all. Seeing Minus the Bear live guarantees Knudson headbanging and jumping up onto the drum stand, hitting cymbals with his guitar head, even as the notes he’s slinging sound like glistening synths or chopped and screwed samples. The main “riff” on opener “The Game Needed Me” is a tapping alarm clock and a stumbling block of notes and sound like a tape machine being rewound. While in Botch, he gleefully tortured his guitar. Here he leans towards expanding his sonic palate in more colorful ways. There are remarkable moments where he, in tandem with Bayles’ subtle, atmospheric keys, replicates weather patterns. The chiming, downtempo “El Torrente” conjures rain soaked, coastal evenings, “Hooray” feels like snowballs are flying through his whistling lines, and “Pachuca Sunrise” replicates the first feeble fingers of morning creeping up over the horizon. 

Snider gamely joins in, bringing more traditional, but also thrilling, guitar patterns. Once Knudson loops his atmospheric lines on “Pachuca Sunrise,” the two of them interlock with a chopping, disco-ish groove. Even better is the twin-headed guitar solo of “The Fix” which, in a more just world, would’ve been one of the final songs in Guitar Hero’s debut the next year. Murchy’s deeply melodic bass is put in lockstep with Tate’s kick and hi-hat patterns, serving as an anchor weight when the guitars threaten to go adrift like runaway hot air balloons. Tate deserves praise as one of the most easily recognizable drummers of his era. He starts with laser precision; his timing almost uncannily in its perfection on the closing snare pattern on “The Game Needed Me” or the fluttering cymbal crashes on “Michio’s Death Drive.” Then later he’s unleashed an avalanche of sticks upon his kit, please see the bouncy, funk-laden outro of “The Fix.” 

Those more frantic moments underpin the lyrics and mood of Menos El Oso. This is a young man’s album—or more accurately, a young man on the precipice of not being young. Most of the members were just about to turn 30 when the record came out, and the impossible balance between responsibility and hedonism permeates the album. “The Game Needed Me” has Snider sneering at desk job jockeys, “would you ever miss your desk’s caress?” but there’s an undercurrent of worry. Everyone in the Minus the Bear had been in other bands that had failed—what if this didn’t work out? Snider never directly answers that question, but the band’s first overseas tour before Menos El Oso adds a layer of melancholy, wonder, and a need to escape that was absent on their previous work. “Memphis & 53rd” has Snider in Lost Highway trouble, with a companion constantly urging him to flee to the next town while a “man in a black coat” haunts his dreams as Tate’s drums stumble and groan beneath him. On closing duo “The Pig War” and “This Ain’t a Surfin’ Movie” (there’s a song title), Snider is pleading for a partner to join him in the sea, less for romance and more so that he can clear his head and feel at peace. “I know we won't want for much/ It's just you and me and a bed and a shoreline,” he sings. Though Snider’s voice can have a detached quality, his sighing coo adds quiet desperation to the notes, uncertainty to the dreams he’s expressing.