Austinist Album Review - The Straw Bear Band From The Seas To The Stars
Comprised of Dominic Cooper and a few friends, The Straw Bear Band are a U.K. folktronica act poised with acoustic guitars in hand and feet sewn to synthesizer pedals.
While their acoustic/electronic juxtaposition is nothing new, The Straw Bear Band try to mix things up on their debut From The Sea To The Stars with an ambitious, nearly cinematic storyline. It isn’t often that a band will summarize the scope of their album in a few simple sentences, but here we go (spoiler alert): “From The Sea To The Stars tells the story of a car that turns into a boy. The boy suffers migraines, and dreams of the stars to escape. Upon waking he sees those stars drip and form a girl. A girl who he spends only a short time with, before they both turn in to a red giant.” There you have it - car becomes boy, boy meets drippy-star girl, boy and girl become a red giant. A tale as old as time.
From the sound of it, this story deserves its own opus, but From The Sea To The Stars is anything but. Clocking in at around half an hour, The Straw Bear Band’s debut is surprisingly unassuming, especially considering the potential for astral-rock noodling or psychedelic, unbridled narrative weirdness.
Instead, each of the album’s ten songs finds a comfortable, mid-tempo niche and sits itself right down, not really befitting all the fuss with cosmic metaphors. A folk-rock sleeper from start to finish, From The Sea To The Stars conjours up a pretty melody here and there (the quaint “Dream No. 1”) and even flirts with a mechanistic, ground-up approach on the purposefully robotic “Everything Hums." Un-caffeinated to distraction, The Straw Bear Band are frustratingly averse to pushing forward, spending the majority of From The Sea To The Stars in a mid-trot somewhere between early Midlake to any one of the band’s many other contemporary influences.
From The Sea To The Stars is a lazy river of an album; swirling, safe, and even a little soothing in its circular pull. But after half an hour or less, the repetitive drag gets tiresome. Despite its neat cosmic allegory asides and a few sweet melodies scattered here, From The Sea To The Stars stretches too far while offering up too little.
The Straw Bear Band on MySpace
Buy the album through Woven Wheat Whispers
