Since their first full-length album, the expansive and ambitious Red Bloom of the Boom, Bear in Heaven has trimmed its membership down to four members. Whether due to the consequent consolidation of ideas or simply dumb luck, their latest release Beast Rest Forth Mouth certainly feels like a more focused effort. Bear in Heaven is the sort of band that gives you the impression of complete confidence in their sound. They know exactly what buttons to push, levers to pull, and wheels to turn, in ten songs full of electronic grandeur and dark glamour. The younger Bear in Heaven offered the listener an occasional “peak behind the existential curtain,” so to speak, in their moments of indecision. The band behind Beast Rest Forth Mouth fails to expose a single chink in the armor. The result is an album that, at its heights, boasts some of the most starkly beautiful passages of plugged-in, turned-on gothica in recent memory. MORE
