Discover Top Posts Tagged with #infinity overhead

Minus The Bear - Infinity Overhead

I love music that’s technical, weird, and off the wall, but there is a line between technical wankery and a cool and weird song / album. A lot of bands that fall in the prog spectrum are like that, especially prog-rock / metal bands. They care way more about being weird, and writing super long songs that are technically impressive, but they’re not accessible. I want to hear catchy, fun, and accessible songwriting, but I know some people prefer progressive stuff. I can understand the technicality of it, but it just doesn’t appeal to me in the same way that a super fun, energetic, and catchy metalcore album can. That said, there are some bands that I really love in this vein, but they’re more so math-rock and mathcore bands. Mathcore is basically a really technical brand of metalcore, where the riffs and instrumentation are very precise, but they’re also chaotic, weird, and tons of fun. I’m picky these days with it, but bands like The Callous Daoboys and Dillinger Escape Plan are among my favorites.

When it comes to math-rock, I’m not as familiar with the genre, but I do know a few bands, one of which being Minus The Bear. These guys were formed in the ashes of metalcore band Botch, but they were around for a long time from 2001 to 2018, only to get back together last year. I’ve only ever heard one of their albums, 2010’s Omni, and I remember picking up a copy back when it came out. I haven’t heard it in years, but I’ve been wanting to hear more of their stuff, so I was happy to find a copy of 2012’s Infinity Overhead at Half Price Books. This was the follow-up to Omni, and I wasn’t familiar with it, but I was curious to check it out, anyway. I was pleasantly surprised by it, but the more I listen to it, the less I’ve been going back to it.

It took me a bit to realize why, but I read a review that summed my thoughts up perfectly; to put it in my own words, the album is technically impressive, but the riffs and arrangements don’t mean a whole lot when the hooks aren’t great. Their vocalist has kind of a flat voice that doesn’t quite sound bad, but I’m not a huge fan of it. The songs sound cool, having their unique brand of guitar-driven math-rock with cool synths in the background, but the hooks really don’t keep me coming back. It’s one of those albums that I listen to, and I really like it, but it leaves almost no impression. I tell myself that I’ll listen to it again to really get a feel for it, so the cycle continues. This album is cool, and it’s thankfully kind of short, only around 42 minutes, but that’s pushing it. It’s a technically impressive album, and there are some cool songs on this album, but it falls a bit short. I like it every time I put it on, but out of everything I got recently, I haven’t been going back to this much.