ART BEARS Hopes And Fears Orig UK LP Henry Cow Avant

	£		34
	$		45

** RECORD COLLECTOR **

ART BEARS

Hopes And Fears

Original UK LP released on Ré Records in 1978. Gatefold Sleeve.

A warm and wonderful avant-garde band consisting of Fred Frith, Chris Cutler, and vocalist extraordinaire Dagmar Krause. Frith and Cutler were longtime members of the seminal English radical political avant-garde art rock band Henry Cow, while Krause sang primarily with the fine German band Slapp Happy and in Henry Cow's latter years. The Art Bears were intended as a short-term project, but, even so, their three-year existence resulted in three excellent albums that relied more on shorter, more traditional, almost pop-oriented song forms than huge, complex musical and lyrical extrapolations. The political tinge of the Henry Cow years never went away, and it was unsurprising that Marxist rhetoric and anti-capitalist diatribes formed much of band's lyrical firmament. Frith, as he proved in Cow, was (and is) a guitarist of astonishing ability, combining a searing, complex technique reminiscent of the free music improvisations of seminal British guitarist Derek Bailey with a boyhood love of blues and early British rock & roll. Cutler, a pop music theorist as well as drummer, skittishly plays his trap kit, providing a propulsive rhythmic base upon which Frith can dazzle. Admittedly, Dagmar Krause's quasi-operatic, very German style can take some getting used to, but she is a daring singer, unafraid to bend and twist her voice into knots or screech with uncontrolled passion and exuberance. Their life was fleeting, but the Art Bears wrote and recorded bold, challenging, idiosyncratic music that, despite its occasional difficulty, is ultimately very rewarding.

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The first album from Dagmar Krause, Chris Cutler, and Fred Frith's post-Henry Cow project is one of the art rock masterpieces of the 1970s. It's as politically potent as Henry Cow's more strident work, but couched in more poetic and provocative terms. Opening with Bertolt Brecht's "On Suicide," with Krause declaiming the playwright's bitter lyrics in her semi-operatic style to the wheezing accompaniment of Frith's harmonium, the album continues in that uncompromising vein. Although most of the other members of Henry Cow guest, with reeds player Lindsay Cooper and keyboardist Tim Hodgkinson playing on a majority of the songs, Hopes and Fears is considerably more focused and powerful than that group's often scattershot albums. The songs are built on Cutler's impressively varied drumming (often on electronically modified instruments), and the amazing variety of sounds Frith is able to coax out of a battery of electric and acoustic guitars, but there's enough space in the music for Krause's unique vocals to shine. Highlights include the epic, multi-part "In Two Minds," parts of which are as close as the Art Bears ever come to conventional rock music (which is to say, not very close at all, but there's an electric guitar solo), and the puckish instrumental, "Moeris Dancing."

Tracks Are :-

Side One

Oh Suicide

The Dividing Line

Joan

Maze

In Two Minds

Side Two

Terrain

The Tube

The Dance

Pirate Song

Labyrinth

Riddle (Turn by me)

Moeris, Dancing

Piers ("The leech of life, the graft of grace")

Released on 'Ré Records' in 1978

Catalogue No. Ré 2188

Disc is in EX++ condition

Sleeve is in EX+ condition

Please contact me via Ebay Messages with any questions I will try my best to get back to you as quickly as possible.

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CD's £2.50 FOR THE FIRST THEN 50p FOR EACH ADDITIONAL

To our regular customers outside Europe - unfortunately we have had to increase combined postage charges to non-European destinations. We have tried to hold off doing this for a long time but have been losing so much money on these packages that the increase is now unavoidable.

*********DOUBLES COUNT AS TWO*********

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