New Black Bear Boxer record is music by and for Columbia's rock community
With its new record "Tranquilizer," Columbia's Black Bear Boxer stands up and sounds out a testimony, heralding the gospel of the concept album.
Tracing — and purposefully wandering from — the blueprint sketched by iconic records like Pink Floyd's "The Wall" and My Chemical Romance's "The Black Parade," bandleader Derrick Cowan crafted a seamless listening experience. Technicolor sounds and narrative sympathy unspool the story of all we're losing: our personal tragedies, but also our collective social unmooring.
But these songs supply their own antidote. The true concept animating "Tranquilizer": a vision is no solitary thing. Cowan turned to community, his musical ideals gathering power from the approximately 25 local musicians who grace the album.
Well-loved acts from The Many Colored Death to The January Lanterns, Don't Mind Dying, Mercury Trio and more are represented here, surrounding Cowan with a studio band for the ages.
Writing an album that plays like a movie
The album's title materialized exactly one day after the last Black Bear Boxer release, 2018's "Set in Light," entered the atmosphere. Cowan needed time to discern what such a loaded term, "Tranquilizer," meant in life and to his art.
Conversing with the presence of grief and absence of a dear friend after their death, Cowan started writing songs about loss, depression, self- and social medication. The weight of pain and the weight of hoping anyway bring a real and balanced heaviness to the record.
Cowan heard a cohesive body of work gathering itself, but spent time and intention ensuring the pieces fit the whole and the whole never swallowed up the power of individual songs.
"It was like writing a movie almost — you have to wait for things to come and figure out where your beats are," Cowan said.
Revisiting albums like "The Wall" and "The Black Parade," Cowan observed how even great bands let inspired concepts slip through their hands. Substance can be sacrificed on the altar of scope, he said — in Pink Floyd's case, its wild grandeur; for My Chemical Romance, a desire to tighten the songs and the screws.
Cowan sought a "halfway point between those two — it feels like a concept and it feels like you’re living through a story, but also having actual songs."
Getting from Side A to Side B
"Tranquilizer" locates the center without compromise. Divided into halves, bridged by a song called "The Mountain," the album bears clearly defined songs while constantly fingering connective threads.
Side A is more outward-facing, purposefully building bombast. Opening with a recorded conversation that leans into a sort of mutual therapy, a cinematic chaos soon arrives.
"I wanted to overwhelm the listener at the very beginning," Cowan said, and from that sense of being overcome, encourage clinging to certain moments or impressions.
These early tracks make space for chanted and processed vocals, chain-gang rhythmic motion, ascendant guitars and, piercing the mix, radio-ready melodies.
Side A establishes a sort of extravagant soul music, in the way that seminal David Bowie and Arcade Fire records qualified as soul music. Acts like Muse and Queens of the Stone Age also press their influential thumbs on these tracks.
A tune like "KID" enfleshes all Cowan's aims as sampled Fox News bluster and brimstone religious programming adorn a song as catchy as the hell these voices warn against. Songs like "The Paper Rebellion" and "KID" on Side A and Side B's "Bittersweet" could rule any era of radio from the '90s forward, beautifully spending an inheritance left by Brit-rockers.
More contemplative but never any less anthemic, Side B works inside-out, culminating in the sentiment "Someday I won't break."
Building a band from the ground up
Creating "Set in Light" almost entirely in a room by himself, the solitary experience wrecked Cowan's relationship to the result for a time, he said. As "Tranquilizer" began to form on the inside, Cowan didn't want it to stay there.
"There was a real conscious effort to do it with people," he said.
Co-hosting a podcast centered on the physical tools of making music, Cowan and a friend invited Columbia musicians to come on the mic and discuss their gear. Ruminating on the record, he also heard the future of Black Bear Boxer music in their conversations.
Cowan extended some second invitations, into the creative process. He fit people to musical moments "based on what I loved about them," he said. Considering where to position Jason Caton, for one, Cowan considered how the Columbia rocker "has every great guitarist inside of him."
Another presence on the album, Ryan Hobart is a "scholar" on the drums, Cowan said, which gave him confidence for certain situations.
The process behind "Tranquilizer" yielded a core Black Bear Boxer band, with Cowan joined by guitarist John Taube, bassist Chris McEuen and drummer Chris Downing. Casting forward, he sees this quartet bridging periods of the band, bringing to life whatever music comes next.
Cowan hopes "Tranquilizer" inspires listeners in two directions. This is the sound of him devoting time to work through grief and all its awful questions. Perhaps these songs will guide their audience to process pain in their own time and fashion; the record is never meant to suggest "this is the only story" of loss, he said.
And the spirit of collaboration is alive and well in the Columbia scene, Cowan said. "Tranquilizer" is proof of concept. After bearing witness to its story, he'd love to see peers pursue similar projects, congregating to make one voice from many, articulating the truth that we're never alone.
Black Bear Boxer's album release show begins at 7 p.m. Saturday in Rose Park; Last American Cowboy and My Twins share the bill. Tickets are $6-$8. Visit https://rosemusichall.com/ for information.
Aarik Danielsen is the features and culture editor for the Tribune. Contact him at adanielsen@columbiatribune.com or by calling 573-815-1731. He's on Twitter @aarikdanielsen.
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Black Bear Boxer's new musical vision fulfilled by Columbia rock scene
