If you were paying attention to mid-2010’s indie and math rock, the odds are you heard someone at some point raving about Portland’s Bearcubbin’. Their instrumental jams were positively stacked with different bits and pieces that kept you coming back to explore – even to this day, we’ll throw on Girls With Fun Haircuts and find something new, and it’s been 10 years since it came out.
Sadly, fans were crushed when the band announced their breakup not long after that album’s release. Despite a whole decade of time, we still get messages every once in a while like “what happened to Bearcubbin’?” or “this Bearcubbin’ band is sick, are they still around?” and all we can do is shrug and/or wince. We definitely counted ourselves among the masses of unrequited fans, and there hasn’t really been any bands that garner direct comparison, not that they should feel compelled to do so, we just missed how damn fun Bearcubbin’ was.
However, things got interesting a few weeks ago, and it seems like perhaps the lights have come back on in a different form – meet Layers in Lairs. We had heard that the project featured Bearcubbin’ alumni, but it’s so common to hear that one band features members of another that we didn’t jump for it immediately. Luckily, our friend Ben Toledo of Wave Mosaic made sure we got on it, and we’re so stoked that he did. It turns out that Chris Scott, one of the main brains in Bearcubbin’, is the driving force of Layers in Lairs, and here he is assisted by Jacob Moran on drums who does an incredible job backing it all up.
Check it out below:
Layers in Lairs manages to carve a bit of their own sound here as well, getting chunkier than ever with the opener “What Makes You Cool.” That being said, we are pretty sure Bearcubbin’ fans are going to easily glom onto the project’s similar instrumentation. Those perky DL-4 loops indeed percolate the entire record, and we are beyond grateful because that’s the exact spark we’ve been missing this summer, if not the last ten years. It’s not that loops have been absent of course, if anything the opposite is true, but Chris’s distinct voicing within the samples are what elevate the music to an almost immediately recognizable level, especially when he throws in those little glockenspiel parts.
Even within the bliss of familiarity, it’s great to hear these sounds stretched to new limits. There’s more crunch, more ecstasy, and more conviction in the sounds here than ever before. It’s truly a victorious debut, yet also functions as a functional headstone for grieving Bearcubbin’ fans. The album even contains unreleased / unfinished material from Bearcubbin’ sessions of yesteryear, with Patrick Dougherty and Mike Byrne receiving writing credits for them in the liner notes.
Much like the album’s overall circuitous concept, we’re at once witnessing a hello, a goodbye, and a hey, check out these badass sounds, so overall it makes for a genuinely complete experience.
Check out more from the band here.
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