Soldier Bear

Soldier Bear

Towering monolith
Mighty militia beast
What have those eyes seen?
What do those eyes see?

Hills of the east
To the wars of the west
We march to the drum
That beats in your chest

Another cigarette
To fill your ursine lungs
The furry fusilier
Who never fired a gun

Marching on all fours
Munitions your back
Never falter
Always ready for attack

SOLDIER BEAR SOLDIER BEAR

Grizzly, gargantuan
Ever the gentleman
Throw a salute
And we'll throw you a smoke

Where honour and valour
Were stretched 'til they snapped
You gave us a banner
To gather our hope

Marching on all fours
Munitions your back
Never falter
Always ready for attack

And when you're caged and grey
And all your fights are won
Oh mighty soldier bear
March on into the sun

SOLDIER BEAR SOLDIER BEAR

Rebasser links

I realised that my blog had no useful links, so here are some:

Our Myspace
www.myspace.com/porpoiserock



Katie Fitzgerald's Pub
www.myspace.com/katiefitzgeralds

Rebasser

This bit is going to be kind of semi-third-person, at least for a while;
seems like it will be easier that way.



Porpoise has had a rather dramatic week.

On Tuesday 17th of this month, Doctor Jonathaniel Behrendt, was recalled by Special Branch for a series of Top Secret Black Ops, Codename: Operation Classified, documented in MI?'s notorious Invisble Dossier.
Jon's two year stay in Porpoise had given him the time he needed to lay low & train his body & mind to optimum performance, & he thanked the innocent civillian members of the band on behalf of The Queen, Elizabeth the Second, & the Jude0-Christian God, God.

The cover story for all of this excitement & adventure is that he is going to be returning to his spawning-ground of Weybridge, Surreyshire, where he can drive his girl's car & impersonate a faun without attracting too much attention. He will probably do some kind of music again, on his little guitar, I'd have thought.
He will also be scurrying to various locations around the globe. It's alright for some!


The less work-shy(!) members of Porpoise immediately set to work on a solution to fill the booming void that being bassless had rended in their sound.
They considered all options, including various configurations of the band as a three-piece, which they had done before to heroic success. This particular answer would have meant re-arranging the new tunes that Pete, The Dave, & Gaz, had been working on over the last couple of months.
The new, fairly complex tunes, with all the twin lead. If one of the existing Porp-axemen switched to four strings & sub-frequencies, what would happen to all the twin lead?

Although, if it came to it, Porpoise would undoubtedly have "pulled one out of the bag", the band were blessed with an offer of a bassist from alleged "Ambient Disco Boy" & Inertia Blooms mouth, Mitch. That bassist is Jarrod Jad Hill, a golden moose of a man, & already a known associate & indeed friend of The Dave's.
Pete met up with Jad on Saturday night, they fell in love, & the deal was sealed.


Pete, Dave, & Gaz recorded 5 of their new tunes in a kind of "bass karaoke" style at practoise on Tuesday, & Jaddy will be attending his first jam with "The Band" on Sunday.

Exciting!



So, we lost a bassist; then we found a bassist. Classic.

Anyhow, the new songs continue to shape up really well in a kind of giant-robot-classic/country-rock kind of way. Like friendly evil. Wooooooooooogh.


New artwork is surfacing on our Myspace, still producing it in quite an ad-hoc kind of way, & thinking about different methods to explore. Also, we're working on the lyrics for the new tunes at the moment, & are trying to make it so that the artwork & the words will progessively become more cohesive.
By the time we've got the album ready, we are hoping to have something really amazing!


Also, we now have a gig before our projected comeback in May;
a benefit for Sidney Keane, on the 16th of April @ Katie Fitzgerald's,
where all money raised will go to help out dogs who are having a rubbish time.



The Dave,

x

February Update

February is upon us and the songwriting is going well. We had the basics jammed out a month or two ago but it's the fine tuning and adding extra twists that takes the time. We have been working on three new ideas in the last month. All with working titles 'Chunky' , 'Math' & 'Rancho Relaxo'.

'Rancho' seemed the hardest to fix together. After jamming for nearly an hour and coming up with what seemed like a whole new song (or could have been a Fugazi cast off) we decided the best part, which had some guitar harmonics was worth keeping. We ended up writing a new intro and adding both bits forcefully to Rancho and forging a whole new song. The new tunes are sounding pretty damn good at the mo. Dave's been adding some words to a few of them as we go along. There's certainly an abstract World War II theme going on.

We want to get these songs right before we gig them. I think we have improved as a band because of the hard work we have put in. Gaz has some fuckin A drum parts, i don't know what he's been doing but he wants to keep it up!

We'll prob post a rehearsal recording when we a re a bit more ahppy with what we are doing to give you an idea of the kind of direction we've taken.

Cheers!


P

If there was any confusion clouding your monkey mind as to the respective identities of the two gentlemen in the above photographic, please allow me to set the record straight-

* The guy on the left? With the beard? With the bald head? That'd be me- Dave. Pleased to meet you!

* The other guy? Mister right-hand-side? With the Queen t-shirt? Pete. He appears to be known as "The Purpose?" whilst blogging here. His reasons for being "The Purpose?"? Who can say? Who, indeed, can say...

I kind of had to get that out of the way to avoid people jumbling us up in the future. It happens more often than you'd think. It happening at all should be more often than you'd think...


Secondly, I'd kind of like to expand on some of the topicage that Peter "The Purpose?" Porpoise (his rap names are PP?P & Triple P) has been talking about in the previous couple of blogs on here.


Firstly, here's a link to Mike "Not The Guy From The Waterboys" Scott's review of our last ep for Punktastic (where folks are confused & paranoid about what music should be like, & what music should be liked); http://www.punktastic.com/reviews/3113

Check out the bit where you can click on the link to "comment on/review it yourself", or whatever it actually says, at the bottom of the article. It's where I quibble the punx out of a thread.

Here's Mike "Not The Guy From The Waterboys" Scott's Myspace page; http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=126506713
A link to our music is more than he gave us, so i hope the dribbling Jagger impersonator/drunken Hard-Fi wannabe is eternally grateful.
*Words & phrases I'd like to use in reference, also; mockney, Plan B, Billy Bragg, thinks the lyrics to Alkaline Trio songs are profound.
Idiot Idiot Idiot.
Maybe he's alright to talk to in real life, though.

Anyway, as Pete's been saying, we're kind of drawing a line under all that now. We've been a band for nearly two years now, without any kind of target for what we should sound like, what scene/genre we want to be in. I just really enjoy playing the electric guitar within a band, making better sounds; more complex, yet still with enough hook; a "pop" resonance.
We are constantly working out what we are as a band, & as Pete has perhaps implied, we feel the closest to that realisation at the moment.

A key moment in this process was when Jon (our bass boy), Pete, & myself went to A(ll) T(omorrow's) P(arties) last month. Pete's girlfriend Lara went with us too, but, although she is very lovely, she is not officially a member of the band.
To cut what could be a long story short (witch-themed cafes, Captain Clunge, 2p machines, passive intoxication, thwarted marriage predictions, golliwog theories, etc, etc, etc), we realised that much of the line-up for this particular ATP were slightly older, raggedier, fuzzier chaps than you would find at any other festival- genre misfits, not cliched or garishly scowling, uniformly Jagermeister & matt-black E minor to count as mainstream metal. Too gnarly or just damn weird to be punk. Almost "post-rock" in places. Tons of imagination.
There were a couple of generations of these bands, too- kind of all lumped together, because they don't belong anywhere else. Maybe a bit like us? Like our friends?
(If I were reading this, maybe I'd think this was as much scenester mentality as much as Mike "NTGTW" Scott's, but in this slightly surreal situation of my confronting myself over this point, I would answer thus; "some scenes are better than others; generally the scenes which you end up in inadvertently as a result of you doing what you'd be doing anyway- rather than doing stuff to be in a scene. God, but we're miserable, aren't we? Why do we overthink these things so?")

This is pretty much the kind of thing I've wanted to do for yeeeears (heavy... pop... outsiders), & we were already teetering on the brink with some of the stuff we'd been writing (...Bat Queen, Soldier Bear, Mechacabras). So, yeah, we told Gaz about stepping up the drums, which he has responded to MOST admirably, & away we go. We're all pushing ourselves to get every last glimmer of musical energy out of ourselves through our new songs, in the hope of creating a sense of brutal euphoria- like a lovely bear-hug. Like a lovely bear-hug from Ursa Major.

I'm gearing up to do some new artwork for us, too, as we enter what should be a pretty cool new year for us. I do the illustration, Pete does the graphic design work.
Meanwhile, we're racking our brains for lyrics for the new songs- there may even be a concept.

So, we're not gigging for a couple of months; then we'll return with kick-ass tracks with caterpillar tracks. Shortly after that, we'll record them, & stick them onto something you can listen to them on.
Who's for vinyl?


I'm signing off now; if I think of anything else to say, I can say it later...

In a bit!

x

Writing Process

As you may know, we vowed recently to writing a new batch of songs. We have been playing some of them for over a year (we realised recently that we actually played 2 of them at our first ever gig) and whilst they are decent enough songs, we have recently been writing darker more complex songs which really impressed each other. I fucking hate it when you go see a band and they don't play anything off their first album! Luckily for us we don't have an album har har, but we have played the old songs enough to know that 'Soldier Bear' is worth keeping and semi new song 'Mechacabras'. it was infact Mecha that inspired us to keep writing. We just came up with it one week when Jon was away. When he returned and added the balls to it, we knew we had a new direction.

The songs we are currently working on all have structure, but no words. every song has a working title which means nothing other than either what it sounds like or a random comment that coined the song name at the time. So far we are working on: Rancho Relaxo, Truckers, Disaster, Chunky, Math. The last two are really new songs that have only come about in the last few weeks. They sound pretty damn cool so far.

We are working hard to get these songs together. Drop C tuning has given us a whole new playing field not only with tone but with vocal range (which none of us really have, but if you imagine we now have a bit!).

Samu.co.uk January Pick!

Yeah! Porpoise are the January pick on the Independent music retailer Samu. Our EP 'Ursine Major' can be bought through this site for £3 including the postage. This is as indie as it gets. They get a cut for holding our stock, we get a cut for making this beautiful hand made EP's. We recorded it, we made the art. We rule. Well we think so anyway. The faux journo dick at Punktastic didn't. Nevermind, i hope he got a new tattoo for xmas to match the other kool ones.

http://www.samu.co.uk for more details of Ursine Major kids!