Upon first listen to any Bear In Heaven track, it’s tempting to stamp them with a quirky, hyphenated indie brand and call it a day. But the entirety of their sound is not automatically divulged to the listener, and only reveals itself after several listens. Their music is capacious — designed to fill large spaces, with room for reverberation. And like all things exquisite, it gets better with time.

Made up of Jon Philpot, Adam Wills, Joe Stickney and Sadek Bazarra, the Brooklynites’ ethereal collection of songs has been tagged with descriptors like folksy-pop, prog, synth-pop and dreamwave to name a few, and has drawn comparisons from Pink Floyd to Depeche Mode. Suffice to say, their sound might as well exist in a realm of genre-less charm.

After the success of their 2007 debut, “Red Bloom of The Boom”, the hype surrounding their follow up, “Beast Rest Forth Mouth”, is palpable, and the title just as much a mouthful. “I always laugh when people who become familiar with this album get excited to find there’s another one,” explains Wills. “Then they’ll ask excitedly what the first album is called and I always blush and say quietly ‘Red Bloom of the Boom.’ It just infuriates people, and it’s funny to witness.”

It is this lighthearted and wry nature that radiates in their sound, filled with hazy guitars, hypnotic drumming patterns, and Philpott’s delicately high-pitch voice. While they are serious about developing their sound, the way they first released their music was less than strategic. Philpot, the band’s founding father, lead song writer and multi-instrumentalist, first moved to Brooklyn “really just to get a job,” and in the process put out an album. “I was doing music but never intended to do it like this,” he says. “I was always recording some stuff here and there, and then when I got to New York eight years ago, I accidentally released a record from my bedroom.”

In the same vein, guitarist Wills and drummer Stickney gravitated to Brooklyn nearly a decade ago after graduating college, to pursue work and in search of cheap rent. In fact, Stickney asserts that he came to Brooklyn from Alabama “to get away from music, actually.” The fortuitous network of talent eventually manifested itself as the current incarnation of Bear In Heaven, who currently find themselves globe-trotting their little hearts out on tour, while accumulating a mass of admirers in the process.

But their story hasn’t been all  Hype Machine hearts and Sony record deals. In fact, prior to 2009 and the soaring success of  ”BRFM,” they were just a bunch of music enthusiasts strumming along somewhat aimlessly, their music-hub locale a petty convenience. The 2007 release of “ROBTB,” while fantastic, was seemingly not mainstream-sounding enough to secure a name for them anywhere outside of the Brooklyn bubble. They’ve had to fight to be taken seriously and to not have their music be taken for granted.

But now, they’re on their way up, thanks to their acclaimed new album and blogger-approved single, “Lovesick Teenagers. “People get really excited when we start to play it,” says Philpot, “but equally, there are other songs we play live that really freak people out and get a way bigger applause. That’s the beauty of playing live: people come and they listen and they hear we have other songs and get excited.”

Despite all the brouhaha that comes with being the next big thing (they were recently the apple of SXSW’s eye), what’s still most striking about Bear In Heaven is the persistent happy-go-luckiness about them, both on and off stage. Their rapport is a well-fortified force, casting light on what are sure to be future successes. Even when broaching potentially awkward topics, they manage to ease the mood. Upon drawing attention to the glaring lack of their fourth band member during the interview (and subsequent photo shoot), for instance, they respond giddily: “There’s a perfectly good answer to that and we made a video about it! It’s on the internet! It has lasers in it!” they explain, before adding, “Oh yeah, we like to make funny videos too.”

- Gigi Rabnett

(photo courtesy of Dean West)