Minus the Bear - Omni

I picked Omni up secondhand at Factory Records in Dover, NJ while hanging out with my friend Dylan. To be honest, I was looking for Highly Refined Pirates, but this was the only Minus the Bear album they had in stock. I’d been listening to them a lot on S***ify and wanted to start buying more math rock for my CD collection. Unfortunately, this is the album where they dropped the pretense of being a math rock band forever. Minus the Bear’s relationship with the math rock scene has always been tenuous because, unlike most math rock bands, Minus the Bear fucks. Their closest thing to a hit song is a delay-pedal ska song about going to Ibiza and thinking about your ex the whole time. Every song on Omni is about rutting, making out, or wanting to make out and rut.

Omni was produced by Joe Chiccarelli, who also produced Wincing the Night Away by the Shins and Evil Urges by My Morning Jacket the previous two years and has mix and engineering credits for the likes of Oingo Boingo, The White Stripes, and Sparta. It’s tempting to blame him for the record’s more commercial-ready indie sound, but that’s probably not entirely fair. I do blame him for not telling bassist Cory Murchy to stop fucking around and just play the roots, and for mixing his bass as if he had done that anyway. The bass tone on this album is universally abysmal - muddy, gooey, sequestered from the rest of the mix by an aggressive eq. But I think that the primary blame for this record’s badness lies with the songwriting.

I have never seen anyone make this point of comparison for Minus the Bear, but here goes: Omni feels kind of like post-By The Way Red Hot Chili Peppers. I know I just said that the bass was shit in a very non-Flea way, but hear me out. Jake Snider’s vocal delivery kind of sounds like an Anthony Kiedis who finished college, never did smack, and dated women his own age. So instead of bizarre non-sequiturs, he sings about sex in the missionary position with his monogamous female romantic partner. The synths and rhythm guitars are pretty standard L.A. pop fare for 2010, but Dave Knudson’s classic rock leads and bubbly delays still keep it feeling “Minus-the-Bear-y”. Funky album lowlights “The Thief” and “Summer Angel” really do sound like RHCP songs that got produced by… well… the same guy who did Evil Urges. And a sentient DL-4.

When the band gets a little glitchy with it, or a little reggae with it, things improve markedly. “Into the Mirror” and “Animal Backwards” sound like they’re written to be played back to back live, and they retain the most of the live-looping spirit of their early work. “Secret Country” is a fun, dubby alt-rock ditty with a cool baritone guitar riff and a radio-worthy refrain. “Hold Me Down” jumps on the Interpol-but-with orchestration trend that was going around at the time, and it’s perfectly serviceable at that. It’s disappointing that the only album I have by this band is the one where they stop caring about the wonky stuff that originally drew me to them. At least their next album Infinity Overhead has Cold Company on it (arguably their best pop song? arguably their BEST song? it’s pretty fuckin’ good). I’m still shocked that this band has the guy from Botch in it. The worst thing is that I know that if I had listened to this album when it came out, it would absolutely have been my jam. I was super into keyboard-led indie rock in the early 2010s. Unclouded as I am by nostalgia in this case, I see an unsteady album with more misses than hits.

The clear plastic outer sleeve with white text on it is interesting, but hasn’t really held up to age, nor has it kept the digipak from being worn down. Wrapping your digipak in plastic kind of defeats the purpose of a digipak in the first place, doesn’t it? The colorful, minimalist cover art gives way to dark, paint-splattered cosmic darkness on the inside. I wish that thoughtful, playful design like this would go with a more thoughtful, more playful record.

Omni by Minus the Bear is a bad album, and I don’t like it.

Wait a second - what’s that other disc in here?

Hot dog, a mix CD! This must have belonged to whoever gave this away. There’s a mix of stuff from around this era: some late Blink-182, two early Balance & Composure songs, a very pirated Attack! Attack! song, some Enter Shikari, some AFI, and that one Anberlin song. In retrospect, the verses on “Feel Good Drag” honestly feel like what Minus the Bear was going for on a lot of Omni. That song rips, this Minus the Bear album doesn’t.