Review Summary: Don't sleep on this if you've ever liked this band
The Bunny The Bear are an electronic/experimental post-hardcore band from Buffalo, New York, that began in 2008. Spearheaded by its founding member, Matthew Tybor, the group currently consists of only him and his wife, Brooke. Matthew performs harsh vocals as “The Bunny”, Brooke sings as “The Bear” (the animals represented by masks worn on-stage), and all instrumentals appear to be taken care of by Matthew in the studio. Despite frequent line-up changes since the project’s inception, the band’s core style has remained largely the same, as Matthew has always been the primary songwriter and lyricist.
The Moments That Cost is the first TBTB album since Matthew joined forces with his wife. While the role of The Bunny has always remained the same, Brooke is the sixth Bear, and the second of which to be female. The clean vocals in TBTB’s music have always been sung at a higher register, and as such the gender of The Bear has always seemed irrelevant. However, Brooke’s vocals are uniquely feminine, and far more pop-oriented than those of the previous Bears. As such, the individual songs on
The Moments That Cost are more accessible than those of nearly the entire rest of the TBTB’s discography. Matthew, very aware of this difference, has shifted his songwriting to focus more on his wife’s singing, whilst his usual harsh yells and growling are saved for occasional verses and bridges.
As far as the instrumentals go, if you’ve heard at least one TBTB song, then you probably know what to expect: formulaic, chuggy riffs over dancey electronics. While the beats themselves – though unique for the genre – have never been the focal point of TBTB’s music, the production on
The Moments That Cost will command your attention. Everything – from the electronics, to the guitars, to Brooke’s breathy vocals – sound absolutely pristine, and are mixed evenly and immaculately throughout, eliminating one of the main criticisms I’ve had of the band in the past.
The lyrics, as always, are a bit immature, but fun. Matthew, who is coming up on 40, is still out here yelling *** like, “I want to be inside to feel it when your legs shake / I want to be the only reason that your heart breaks”, before his literal wife begins crooning the chorus of a song titled
66Sick. I don’t fault TBTB for their edginess though, as it has always been a core part of the band’s aesthetic and charm. If I can emphasize one true fault of this 9-track album though, it’s that two of the tracks are “redux” versions of earlier TBTB songs (
The Aisle and
April 11), and they are easily the weakest songs on the album. While the other seven tracks have consistent cadence and structure,
The Aisle (Redux) is a slogging, disjointed version of the original, and
April 11 (Redux) is a faster tempo song that doesn’t play to Brooke’s main strength as a vocalist, which is utilizing sparse word count to deliver memorable choruses with sustained melodic notes (best showcased on
Sink,
In The Feels, and
Complacent).
The Moments That Cost could have easily been a 7-track EP or mini-album of all original tracks.
I don’t want to say that I have been an active listener of The Bunny The Bear since the beginning, but I did really enjoy their second album,
If You Don’t Have Anything Nice To Say…, and have been checking back periodically since around 2012 to see if any of their new songs would grip me. None of them did, until I listened to
Worlds Away from this album, at which point I knew that Matthew had finally hit on something (or rather someone) that had re-vitalized the band, that person being his wife. I encourage anyone who has liked this band in the past but had given up or forgotten about them to give this album a listen, as you’ll likely be pleasantly surprised.
