Wednesday, January 18, 2012

THE GOLDEN BEARS: "WRITE IT LIKE YOU FIND IT" (3/21)



  
The Golden Bears are Julianna Bright and Seth Lorinczi, housemates, partners, parents and band. Their second full-length album, Write It Like You Find It, is a love poem to their daughter, to one another and to the bands and music that rescued them from despair along their way.  Songs full of the wonder inspired by new life bump up against hungrier ones, songs bursting with longing for sleep, for sex, for rock and roll. All 12 songs weave together to tell the story of what you lose and find when your life is no longer simply yours.

Seth recorded the band in and around their home studio. On songs like Come To Be, you hear the wide-open sound of the living room where they set up Julianna’s drums, where a duet of strings would set up later to track Seth’s arrangements. Piano parts were tracked in the same room on the 1928 Steinway that once belonged to Seth’s mom. Grittier contributions were confined to the basement where the couple has carefully built a studio over the last 6 years.

Contributions include the honeyed voices and gorgeous backing vocal arrangements ofDave Depper (Ram Project, Loch Lomond) and John Moen (Decemberists, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, Dharma Bums). Other performers include Shelley Short, Sara Lund (Corin Tucker Band, Hungry Ghost, Unwound), and Kate Obrien-Clarke (Ages & Ages).

“The Golden Bears recently treated me to the best live performance I've seen in a long time.  Vocalist/drummer Julianna Bright exudes a wise stage demeanor and, similar to the early styles of Patti Smith, has a soulful, heavy tone that demands attention while remaining mysterious.”
Willamette Week

“A surprise. This is fabulous. Hunt this band down with spears. Net them on the sidewalk. Dig bear pits in their front lawn. BUT, make sure they’re captured alive.” – WW Local Cut

“…It’s a gorgeous record, perfectly suited to the vinyl format, with Bright’s absolutely charming cover art and twelve short songs that add up to something greater than the sum of their parts. Songs flow in and out of each other, motifs are introduced, indulged and expanded upon; the result is divided up amongst two sides that are, in some ways, mirror reflections of each other. The album embraces the strangeness of dreams, the comfort of domesticity, the reassurance of love, the fear of the unknown, and the wide-eyed wonder of childhood imagination. It’s breathtakingly good.”- Portland Mercury

“…The next 20 minutes are spent in a display of thundering throwback rock that makes me wonder how Lorinczi and Bright manage to maintain parallel careers in music, art, parenthood, and culinary journalism while apparently excelling at all of them…the solid analog pounding of their next century psychedelia seems easily suited to a venue three times this size. It's the kind of rock and roll you can feel shaking around in your gut and Bright's drumming pairs so well with Lorinczi's overdriven guitar that it's easy to see why the couple is, well, a couple.  – Willamette Week

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