MP3: The Bear Quartet - World War III
Week #2 and we're going strong! Our latest Bear Quartet tribute post comes from Parasol's Jim Kelly, probably one of the biggest BQ fans I know. His pick? Well, read for yourself:
"World War III" is taken from the "Load it" EP, recorded in 2000 and released in very early 2001, one of The Bear Quartet's truly wondrous b-sides. A sweet, sad little song of truly epic proportions, with lyrics detailing a helicopter rescue and a childhood game of hide-n-seek gone wrong. It touches on fatalism and fealty (or a lack thereof) and finding yourself all sorts of lost for all sorts of reasons. And when it couldn't get any more melancholy, when the girl with the head-injury is happy to be in a helicopter, when the kid with the great hiding place realizes the game ended a long time ago and he's alone, what do they throw in instead of a guitar solo? That's right. Bagpipes. Or something suitably bagpipe-like, a mournful and keening wail, but it's probably just my favorite guitarist on the planet, Jari Haapalainen, playing mandolin through his Fender Twin, or something. So here I am with a lump in my throat and the solemn promise of further heartache (because you know it's not over)... Like when frontman Mattias Alkberg sings bassist Peter Nuottaniemi's wrenching lyrics in the closing stanza: "I was hiding from you who had gone home without telling me, and I swear that sometimes it's like I'm still out there." Hand me a hanky. "World War III" is Scandinavian Melancholy as a musical sub-genre, as a guilty pleasure, as an itch you enjoy scratching, as an incurable affliction, encapsulated in 4 minutes and 4 seconds.
The Bear Quartet - World War III